The whole noisy crowd offered to lead the way, and we set off in a human wave up the stairway. Beggars pressed around me, touching my arms and whispering their needs. Friendly men offered to carry my bag, but thievery and high rates were in my mind, and I clutched the handle ever more fiercely. We flowed up to the crest of the city, gathering new adherents all the way.

At last we came to the inn. The door was locked. One of my most aggressive bodyguards, a grinning hunched-over lad with a great white fungus scab-cap on his shaven crown, pulled the handle of the doorbell, and far away, above the noise of my personal crowd, I heard a tiny ringing—and again was stirred by strong feelings, as I thought of the tinkling of the masthead bells in the gorge.

Soon a white-bearded man dressed in a silk gown appeared at the door, and he bowed to me; then he darted inside for a moment and reappeared with a bamboo staff and began screaming at my followers and flailing about with the dangerous rod. The crowd fell back, cursing and laughing, but did not adjourn.

How grand it made me feel, I confess, to have been greeted by a man clothed in silk!

The man, who turned out to be a brother of the innkeeper, pushed me inside the door and quickly bolted it. One could hear the crowd suddenly murmur and melt.

I negotiated for a room, ordered several dishes for my modest banquet, and then at once asked for a bath.

In a dark, damp, moldy-smelling cavern at the back of the inn I was presently squatting shoulder-deep in a round wooden tub of painfully hot water, and I stayed in it, lathering, rinsing, and growing happier and happier, till it was tepid. Then I put on clean clothes from my bag. I lay down on the brick bed in my whitewashed room to wait for my guests. I felt like a new person. I even began to think back through the gorges in quest of the memory of a suitable dam site.

—

FROM the moment the innkeeper’s brother came bursting into my room to tell me that there were some “river people” at the gate asking for me, I knew that my idea of having a banquet had been a mistake. He looked ill of a bad smell.

I walked with him out into the front courtyard of the inn, and soon I stood with Su-ling and the cook and the others in a reception parlor and stared at them, grotesque in their dirty quilted cotton clothes beside the graceful city man in his silken gown, who looked thunderstruck at the news that these were the foreigner’s guests, and my heart sank.