When I heard that sound I was overwhelmed with emotion. The scene in Wind-Box Gorge leaped vividly into my mind, and I closed my eyes and saw again the disturbing trifles—the Old Big’s expression, the blank face of the humming cook, the hesitant third tracker pecking at the hawser with his knife, Su-ling in true despair, the bow steersman slaking his thirst at the teapot, and the doomed head tracker himself thrashing at the end of the rope—and the water; the froth and waves of the Great River. Then in that unstable sampan, in mid-current, I felt the beginnings of something I had never experienced before at that age, a feeling very deep that I would have found hard then to define-something close to anger, yet close as well to love, a feeling in which pain and joy were mixed; something like determination; perhaps the very first stirring of understanding in me, though I was terribly troubled still by the many things I did not understand. This strange new feeling was, at any rate, more a physical sensation than anything else in those first moments, an upsurge in my chest of elation-with-despair, of a palpable ache that somehow gave me comfort. I know now, for I have experienced it often, that this feeling was really a kind of wishing—that things could be different, that I could be a better person, that the world could be a better place; and with the wishing, a feeling of sadness, regret, and even, it may be, of hopelessness. Many of my friends say they have had this feeling, too; it seems to be a common sensation of our anxious era, which rushes along as swiftly as the Great River in flood. The feeling quickly passed that time, supplanted by a rush of the misery of parting—of leave-taking from a place that demanded awe, from an experience I could never forget, and from human beings whom I had come close to understanding.

Our ferrymen made their landfall, after ten minutes of hard work, at the very center of the stone stairway to the city. They charged me three times as much as any of the Chinese aboard, and for a few moments I was very angry. I remember that during my brief altercation with the ferrymen I absent-mindedly patted the watch pocket in my trousers and was spurred to new heights of pettiness, contempt, and frustrating anger by a sharp thought of my golden timepiece stolen on the junk.

The ferrymen shouted loudly at me and made me appear to be a robber and oppressor for balking at paying them only three times the normal fare, and a crowd gathered, and I was soon very much out of sorts.

I paid off the ferrymen and asked my way to the inn.