“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 innumerable other kinds of vessels, for the Yellow River was more crowded with traffic than was the Silk Road. The Han people, having such tremendous distances over which to freight their goods and produce, prefer to use their waterways rather than overland methods of transport. It is really a sensible practice, however much their Mongol masters ridicule the Han’s disregard for horses. A horse or any other pack animal, over any distance, will eat more grain than it can carry, but the river boatmen consume very little man-fueling food to accomplish each li of travel. So the Han rightfully respect and revere their rivers; they even give the name of River of Heaven to what we Westerners call the Milky Way.
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 gondola is also built with a touch of camber to allow for the fact that the gondolier paddles always on the right side, but a gondola’s keel bend is so slight as to be unnoticeable. These hu-pan were as skewed as a shimshir sword laid on its side. Again, it was a matter of practicality. A hu-pan always travels close against the riverbank, and as its oarsman variously keeps its concave or convex side to the bending shore, it more easily slips around the river bends. Of course, the rower must keep switching stern for bow as the river twists this way and that, so his progress resembles that of an agitated water-strider insect.
Before long, however, I had something even more strange to wonder at—on the land, not on the river. Near a village called Zong-zhai, we came to a deserted and tumbledown ruin that must once have been a substantial stone edifice with two stout watchtowers. Our escort Ussu told me that it had in olden time been a Han fortress of some long-past dynasty, and was still called by its old name: the Gates of Jade. The fortress was not actually a gate, and certainly not made of jade, but it constituted the western end of a massively thick and impressively high wall stretching northeastward from this point.
The Great Wall, as foreigners call it, is more colorfully called by the Han the “Mouth” of their land. In times past, the Han spoke of themselves as the People Within the Mouth, meaning this wall, and spoke of all other nations to the north and westward as the People Outside the Mouth. Whenever a Han criminal or traitor was condemned to exile, he was said to have been “spat beyond the Mouth.” The wall was built to keep all but the Han outside it, and it is unquestionably the longest and strongest defensive barrier ever built by human hands. How many hands, or how long they labored, no one can say. But the construction of it must have consumed the entire lives of many generations of whole populations of men.
According to tradition, the wall follows the wandering course laid out by a favorite white horse of a certain Emperor Chin, the Han ruler who commenced its construction in some distantly ancient time. But I doubt that story, for no horse would willingly have taken such a difficult route along mountaintop ridges, as much of the wall does. Certainly we and our horses did not. Though the remaining weeks of our seemingly never-to-end journey across Kithai required us generally to follow the course of that seemingly never-to-end wall—and while we were seldom out of sight of it from then on—we could usually find lower and easier ground downhill of it.
The Great Wall winds sinuously across Kithai, sometimes uninterruptedly from horizon to horizon, but in other places it takes advantage of natural ramparts like peaks and cliffs, and incorporates them into its length, then resumes again on more vulnerable ground beyond. Also, it is not everywhere just a single wall. In one region of eastern Kithai, we found that there were three parallel walls, one behind another, at intervals some hundred li apart.
The wall is not everywhere of the same composition. Its more easterly stretches are built of great squared rocks, neatly and firmly mortared together—as if in those places it was built under the Emperor Chin’s stern eye— and is to this day still staunch and unbroken: a great, high, thick, solid bulwark, its top wide enough for a troop of horsemen to ride abreast, and with embrasured battlements on either side of that walltop roadway, and with bulky watchtowers jutting up even higher at intervals. But in some of its western lengths—as if the Emperor’s subjects and slaves did only perfunctory work, knowing he would never come to inspect—the wall was built only shoddily, of stones and mud slapped together in a structure not so high nor thick, and consequently has been much crumbled and interrupted by gaps over the centuries.
Nevertheless, in sum, the Great Wall is a majestic and awesome thing, and I am not easily able to describe it in terms comprehensible to a Westerner. But let me put it this way. If the wall could somehow be transported intact out of Kithai, and all its numerous segments laid end to end, starting from Venice, thence going northwestward over the continent of Europe, across the Alps, over the meadows and rivers and forests and everything else, clear to the North Sea at the Flemish port of Bruges, there would yet be enough of the wall to
