The Journeyer

“Like shrouds decaying,” I remarked.

To my astonishment, Ussu said, “That is what they are.” In a hushed voice, he added, “Show respect, Ferenghi. Turn away and do not stare as they go by.”

He did not speak again until the muffled train had passed. Then he told me that all Han people have a great desire to be buried in the places where they were born, and their survivors bend every effort to have that done. Since most of the Han who keep i

All along the Silk Road from Kashgar, we had been fording the occasional minor river—meager streams trickling down from the mountain snows in the south and quickly soaking into the desert to the north. But some weeks eastward of Anxi we found a more considerable river going easterly with us. In its begi

“That Yang-tze and this Huang,” my father said instructively, “they are, after the historic Nile, the second and third longest rivers in all the traveled world.”

I might facetiously have remarked that the Huang must be the tallest river on earth. What I mean—and I am seldom believed when I say this—is that through much of its length the Huang River stands above the land surrounding it.

“But how can that be?” people protest. “A river is not independent of the earth. If a river should rise, it would merely overflow onto the land about.”

But the Yellow River does not, except at disastrous intervals. Over the years and generations and centuries, the Han farmers along the river have built up earthen levees to reinforce its banks. But, because the Huang carries such quantities of silt, and continuously deposits that on its bed, its surface level also continuously goes up. So the Han farmers, over generations and centuries and eons, have had to keep building the levees higher. Thus, between those artificial banks, the Yellow River literally does stand higher than the land. In some places, if I had wished to jump into the river, I would have had to climb a bank higher than a four-storied building.

“But big as they are, those levees are only of packed earth,” said my father. “In one very rainy year while we were last here, we saw the Huang get so full and boisterous that it broke those banks.”

“A river held up in the air and then let fall,” I mused. “It must have been something to see.”

Uncle Mafio said, “Like watching Venice and the whole mainland Veneto submerge beneath the lagoon, if you can imagine such a thing. A flood of unbelievable extent. Entire villages and towns dissolved. Whole nations of people drowned.”

“It happens not every year, God be thanked,” said my father. “But often enough to have given the Yellow River its other name—the Scourge of the Sons of Han.”

However, as long as the river runs tame, the Han make good use of it. Here and there along the banks, I saw the biggest wheels in the world: waterwheels of wood and cane as high as twenty men standing atop one another. Around the wheels’ rims were multitudes of buckets and scoops, which the river considerately filled and lifted and spilled into irrigation canals.

And in one place, I saw a boat beside the bank that had immense, revolving paddlewheels on either side. On first seeing it, I thought it was some kind of Han invention to replace man-worked oars for propulsion. But again I was disillusioned of the vaunted Han inventiveness, for I realized that the craft was only moored to the bank and the paddlewheels were merely turned by the river current. They in turn rotated axles and spokes inside the vessel to make millstones grind grain. So the whole thing was nothing but a water mill, novel only in that it was not stationary, but could be moved up and down the river, to any place where there was a harvest of grain to be ground into flour.

There were i

On the Yellow River there were many shallow scows, called san-pan, and each scow’s crew was a family, to whom the boat was simultaneously home, transport and livelihood. The males of the family did the san-pan’s rowing or towing upstream, and the steering downstream, and the loading and unloading of the cargo. The females did what seemed to be perpetual cooking and laundering. And among them played a multitude of smaller boys and girls, all blithely naked except for a large gourd tied at the waist, to help them float when they fell overboard, which they did with regularity.

There were many larger craft propelled by sails. When I asked our escorts what they were called, the Mongols indifferently said what sounded like “chunk.” The correct Han word, I learned, is chuan, but that means only sailing vessels in general; I never did learn the thirty-eight different names of the thirty-eight different kinds of rivergoing and seagoing “chunks.”

Anyway, the smallest of them was as big as a Flemish cog, but of shallow draft, and looked to me ridiculously cumbersome, like an immense floating wooden shoe. But I gradually perceived that the chuan’s shape is not patterned on a fish, as most Western vessels are, for a fishlike celerity. It is patterned on a duck, for stability on the water, and I could see that it floated serenely over the Yellow River’s most tumultuous whirlpools and whitecaps. Perhaps because the chuan is slow and sturdy, it has only a single rudder for steering, not two as on our vessels, and it is set amidship at the stern and requires no more than a single steersman. A chuan’s sails are also odd, not being let to belly in the wind, but latticed by slats at intervals, so they look rather like ribbed bat wings. And when it is necessary to shorten sail, they are not reefed like ours, but are folded, slat by slat, like a griglia of persiana window blinds.

Of all the craft I saw on that river, though, the most striking was a small oared skiff called a hu-pan. It was ludicrously unsymmetrical, being bent in a sideways arc. Now, a Venetian gòndola is also built with a touch of camber to allow for the fact that the gondolier paddles always on the right side, but a gòndola’s keel bend is so slight as to be u