All these hills embraced the loud hill of the city, which, capped with a teeming architecture above the flood line, was widely split, directly across from us, by an amazing stairway. The stone stairs must have been twice as wide as the great boulevards of Western cities, and they rose and rose and rose from the surface of the river to the very crown of the life on the heights; at any level of the Great River, sampans could touch at the stairs and their passengers could alight with a sense of the hospitality of the place and go up to its turmoil with a certain amount of dignity.

We tied up in a forest of masts across the water, amid shouting and a bustle that was as dazzling and depressing, in its different way, as the churning waters of the lonely river had been.

Here was a terminal of commerce, a big shifting-place of rice and salt and coal and cotton and tree oil and paper made from bamboo, and many other wanted things, and the greeds and lusts and bitternesses of the floating market were noisy and confusing, after the weeks of the spare, melancholy sounds of our progress up the river.

Up from the city across from us, besides, drifted a cloud of the sounds of humanity: hawking, screams of laughter, the claims of beggars on their fellow men, the kitten-cry of infants, venders’ drums, the noise of bells and fiddles, the chants of magicians and jugglers, the moaning and intonations of priests and religious maniacs, and the underlying murmur of gossip, games, neighborly argument, story-telling, love-making—of all kinds of evening solace for hard daytime toil.

I did not want to leave the junk to go into that noisy town, but I knew I must. The cook told me the name of an inn on a street on the brow of the town that was suitable, he said with a pucker of his lips that expressed some kind of irony, for junk owners and foreigners. I packed my Gladstone bag and then stood on deck while a young tracker was sent to fetch a taxi-sampan that would ferry me across the river.

As I waited I had an inspiration, to put off the heavy feeling of impending loneliness that oppressed me: Su-ling and the cook and the bow steersman and the helmsman and the drummer and the rope coiler—all the specialists, about a dozen boatmen—must come to the inn and be my guests at a banquet of farewell that evening.

The cook and Su-ling demurred; they said they wanted the honor of entertaining me, but I could see that their protests were ceremonial, and we soon settled the matter in my favor.