I feared typhoid, but now from this distance I can guess that I was ill of mystification and disappointment, and of a churning up of inner forces I had never known. I had approached the river as a dry scientific problem; I found it instead an avenue along which human beings moved whom I had not the insight, even though I had the vocabulary, to understand. What bothered me, and was incomprehensible to me, was their indolence, their lack of drive, their indifference to goals I held valuable—even to the physical goal toward which we moved without haste, the mid-river port of Wanhsien. So far as I could see, these people had no desire to get ahead. Living day after compartmented day on this primordial river seemed to have done this to them. The central idea of my energetic country meant nothing to them, I thought. Since I had pinned my hopes for China, for an engineered China, upon that idea, I was prostrated, I suppose, as I floated through the awesome terrains of the wild Great River, by what I imagined to have been a terrible discovery—as well as by some trivial germ of that district.

The owner’s wife tended me. Her name was Su-ling. She was a nurse of such delicacy—only hinting gentleness, outwardly brusque and rather impersonal—that I felt the impact of her compassion only in the days of my convalescence; but that came later. In the first days of my fever, she would bring me tea and sometimes broth that the cook, she casually told me, had made especially for me. Now and then she gave me news and anecdotes of our trip, none of which really interested me, since a grippal ache in my head and arms and legs took most of my angry attention. She told me once, I remember, that it had required the better part of two days to negotiate Pierced Mountain Gorge and the open valley above it, for there had been a heavy “down-wind” opposing us; her words gave me my only sense of the passage of our craft through days and air and water.