Chapters (8)
I went to my room, and lay down, and for a short time suffered the blackest melancholy. I soon found myself reliving, all over again, those hours in Wind-Box Gorge; I lay wide awake, with my eyes tight closed, and once more every detail was vivid, stark, and personal. I do not know how long this went on. Suddenly, as I thought of the owner going after the drowning man in the light skiff on the awful water, I was gripped once again by the strange new sensation I had felt in the ferry-sampan crossing the river at dusk—a pang of wishing and despairing so strong that it both exalted and almost choked me. It was very strange. I began, with surprising speed, perhaps as a reaction to these violent feelings, to recover my spirits and, yes, my belief in the dam. This was just the first of it. Four months later I wrote an optimistic, even fervent, report on the possibilities of a dam in Yellow Cat Gorge, where, after further study, during a trip downriver by steamer, the site seemed to me best of all. It is clear that nothing ever came of that report, or of me. Indeed, my great career began and ended with that sheaf of papers. It was dismissed and I was tagged by sound men as impractical. The tag is still on me. The dam is still to be built. It will be, one day—of that I am sure. I feel now again, as I think back, the pang of wishing. I had it very strongly that night on the brick k’ang in the inn in Wanhsien, as I lay on my back on the hard bed turning over in my mind all that I had seen and felt on the river, and thinking of the head tracker and the owner and Su-ling and the cook and the others. I lay wide awake, aching and wishing. I could hear the buzz of the citizens of Wanhsien through the paper-paned window of my room. I heard an itinerant story-teller pass by with a crude shadow-scope, a kind of stereopticon that I had seen in towns downriver, and I heard him wail out his advertisements of famous things to be heard and seen at the modest charge of one round copper coin. Through distant streets wandered a timekeeper, beating on a gong the hours as they fled. All that night the Great River climbed the steps of the myriad city.