“The what?” Tasser hollered back.
The current spat them out, but sideways – the starboard side facing the waterfall – and Nicholai saw a large backcurrent, a small wall of water coming toward them.
“Look out!” he yelled.
The backcurrent lifted the raft and pitched one of the aft oarsmen off the starboard side. Nicholai, one hand on the line, crawled back and tried to pull him out of the water, but Tasser yelled, “The oar! Get the oar, goddamnit!”
Nicholai grabbed the oar just before it slipped into the water.
The crewman was pulled back into the circular current and Nicholai saw him try to stay above water as the current spun him around and around like some malevolent funhouse ride.
“Pull!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai sat down and pulled on the oar, straining every muscle and sinew to try to pull the raft around. They were almost straight when the bow went over the edge. This fall was not as high. They landed in a deep pool and the raft bobbed once before it was pulled into the next chute of water.
The flume raced to a narrow fall between two towers of rock. The raft scraped the edge of the rock to the left, bounced off, and then slid over the low fall onto a shallow stretch that rushed over rocks that banged against the bottom.
Downriver he saw a large column of what looked like smoke.
It wasn’t smoke, though. Nicholai knew that could only be mist from a large volume of water crashing over a very high waterfall.
“Pull to the side!” Tasser yelled.
Nicholai looked to his right, where Tasser was pointing toward a long eddy. But the current was pulling them away, and they had little time or space to make it over into the eddy, and the crews were already exhausted.
He lifted his oar from the water as the crew on the port side pulled. When the raft was pointed starboard, both sides would row as hard as they could, for their lives. He took a few deep gulps of air and then, at Tasser’s order, started to stroke.
It was only a small bump, but it was enough. Nicholai had pulled himself up on the end of his stroke, and the bump hit before he could settle back down and lifted him up and off the side of the raft.
The first thing he felt was the shock of the cold water as he went under. He pulled himself to the surface, then felt the mental shock of knowing that he was in the river and inexorably headed for the waterfall.
He had been in bad situations before, while exploring narrow passages in caves during his happy years with friends in Japan. Then, the chambers had closed in and seemed to offer no way out. Or he’d been trapped by underground streams, the water hissing below him in the pitch black, and he’d enjoyed the danger, so now he forced his mind to dismiss the terror and focus on survival.
The first thing to do was get turned around, so he struggled successfully to get feet-first into the current. He didn’t know what waited at the bottom of the fall, but it was certainly better to encounter it with his feet instead of his head, smashing his legs, perhaps, instead of his neck or skull. He knew that he was dead anyway if the fall landed shallowly on rock, but honor demanded that he do his best.
Then he pressed his arms tightly to his sides and closed his legs to create as compact a vessel of himself as he could, so his limbs wouldn’t create levers that might tip him sideways and roll him, akimbo, over the falls.
He held his neck and head up out of the water until the last possible moment, then took a deep breath (his last? he wondered) and went over the edge.
The fall was long and violent, the water battering him to try to knock him out of his posture, but he held firm, waiting for the “landing” that would shatter his body, maim him, or offer the next challenge.
Then he felt the stillness of a pool and realized that he’d survived the fall.
He looked back up and realized that he’d plunged at least forty feet. Treading water to catch his breath, he looked downstream and saw, on the right edge, both rafts pulled up on the shore.
They were in bad shape.
The canopy of the first raft was stoved in, and several oars were broken. The second raft looked little better, its bow jagged like a broken tooth. But both had made it through the Dragon’s Throat and, miraculously, the crates sat in the middle like cows lying down in the face of bad weather.
One of the crew standing on the edge saw him and started to point and yell as Nicholai, exhausted, swam for the shore, where he just lay on the rough stones, unable to move.
“Thought you were a goner,” Tasser said, standing over him.
“So did I.”
“Glad you made it.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah, you have the rest of my dough.”
On that sentimental note, he pulled Nicholai to his feet.
They spent the next three days resting, repairing the damaged rafts and oars, and perusing the rough map of the next stretch of the river.
“This so-called map is useless,” Nicholai said.
So Tasser and Nicholai walked downstream, climbed a steep cliff on the right bank, and confirmed their worst fear: an enormous fall, higher than the one that nearly killed them, loomed just downstream.
“We can’t run that,” Nicholai said.
“Nope.”
They would have to go around it. With only nine men, a portage would be long and arduous, but they had no choice. So they went back and began the long task of disassembling the rafts and hewing poles with which to heft the crates. This took two more days – making an unplanned delay of five days – so dwindling supplies became a concern. With no villages in the wilderness of the Lekang River gorges in which to buy food, they would have to cut rations, a serious problem with the increase in labor that the portage would extract.
But no one complained about these hardships, when weighed against the terror of another run down worse rapids. The men worked steadily, and in two days they were ready to set out.
For three days they worked in relay teams, hefting, pulling, dragging, and pushing the rafts’ logs up the slope beside the massive waterfall, then lowering them down using ropes wrapped around trees as counterweights. Then, while two of the crewmen reassembled the rafts, the other six men carried the heavy crates with their lethal cargo over the same route.
To the extent that one can enjoy grueling physical labor, Nicholai did so. The battle against the physics of hauling heavy material up and down a mountain and the struggle against the limitations of his own body and spirit seemed simple and clean as opposed to the more underhanded conflicts of his mission.
No deception was involved in this, just the direct application of muscle and sweat, determination and brains. Nicholai found it to be a cleansing process – even the sharp edge of hunger that came on the second day seemed only to sharpen his senses and purge the malaise that he only now realized had set in after leaving Solange.
And the Tibetan crewmen were a marvel of cheerfulness and stamina. Having begun their working lives as sherpas, lugging heavy baggage on the slopes of the Himalayas, they were not daunted by this task and seemed to find the complexities of maneuvering the loads to be a pleasant intellectual as well as physical challenge. They loved to solve the problems of weight and counterweight using complicated arrangements of ropes and knots that fascinated Nicholai.
He resolved that, if he survived this mission, he would spend more time in the mountains and master the techniques of technical climbing.
At night the Tibetans would build a fire, brew strong pots of tea from the dwindling supply, and make soup that got thinner each night. Still it was a good time, resting sore muscles and listening to the tales of ghosts and spirits, sage holy men and brave warriors that the crewmen would tell while Tasser translated into colloquial American English.
Then Nicholai would sleep the sleep of the dead, waking only just before dawn, when the day’s good and hard work would begin again. He was almost disappointed when, after three days, the portage was accomplished, the rafts reassembled, and the journey downriver could begin again.
The river was gentler below these falls. Jagged rocks and shallows, with the occasional rapids, still caused problems, but in only two days, Tasser checked the cartoon-map and happily announced, “We’re out of goddamn
