I had a melancholy sense of the finality of this parting from the junk, but when I feelingly called, “Until again!” to the trackers, to those ragged wonders who had brought us through the gate of Wind-Box Gorge and who now sat apathetic under their mat shed, lice-picking, snoozing, staring, too poor to go ashore and celebrate their little victory over time and space and the river—too familiar, perhaps, with unending pain and work and loss and aches even to have seen it as a victory; when I called a heartfelt informal farewell to them, I say, only two or three looked up at me, and those gaped at me as if I were a total stranger, and did not even grunt a reply but went back to their trivial concerns.

The sampan came by, with two rowers, and already loaded with nearly a dozen passengers, and a mound of their goods, so that the light boat had only a few inches of freeboard and might easily be overturned, yet I had no choice but to pack myself and my bag aboard, and we pulled away from the junk, and when we were fifty feet away I could not tell the vessel on which I had lived for all those days from the others with which it was tied in a crowd of sameness. The junks were all alike. Could each of them have had a trip upriver like ours? And could this have been going on for three or four thousand years?

Our boatmen poled us far upstream in the quiet shallow water along the bank, then, a mile above the city, they dropped their poles, took up oars, and rowed out into the swift current with all their strength. We went diagonally across and down toward the wide stairs of the city. With each push of the oars the ferrymen stamped their feet and gave out a kind of grunt, a rudimentary “Ayah!…”