Edward and Stone carried their silver and Stone’s ukelele and golf-clubs on to a new boat. The new boat, battling against the terrible protest of the river, thrust herself into the yellow shadows of the mountains. One could feel the muscles of the strong ship wrestling with the river. The ship swung; it advanced, it bowed sideways, it reared, it faced the fearful cliffs, it seemed to save itself narrowly from disaster every minute. The river screamed about the ship. The hot sunlight was wild with noise; the shadow of the cliffs was impregnated with terrible deep echoing. The river was a maniac prisoner between the tense leaning golden cliffs. Curious turbulent dreams haunted the water. The surface was flowered and starred with strange boiling shapes; ominous shadows—like hands and serpents and gaping faces—were half seen beneath it; scars of foam were scored across it. The water was too wild to conform to natural laws or to find its own level. There were fifty different levels between cliff and cliff. There were table-lands and canyons in the water, and glaciers of water tilted over hidden rocks. The whirlpools were like sunken golden glass bowls in the water. Or they were like great birds’ nests, great faery rocs’ nests with eggs of cream-gold foam spinning deep down in the nests. Close to the cliffs, the water, in a frenzy of contradiction, flowed the wrong way. Junks could sometimes move upstream without difficulty there. All the upstream junks clung timorously to the red cliffs; they were towed by scores of coolies. Strings of coolies, like beads, tawny or blue, were looped along the bright cliffs. The ropes were tied to the masts of the junks. Women crouched under the hooped, humped matting that covered the junks. A down-stream junk span down the centre of the river. A dozen oarsmen stood on the lower deck and on the poop stood their leader beating time frantically like the leader of an orchestra. The chantey of the oarsmen was as thin as a hair of sound in the voluminous voice of the river. The oarsmen swung and dipped and bowed and fell back in time to the frenzied baton of their leader. The junk looked dark and nervous, dipping like a dark whale. Again it darted heavily like a bee at the whirlpools in the water; it made clumsy feints towards the shining sharp rocks and the cliffs; it twisted, plunged, heeled half over, shuddered, span round and round. Yellow waves washed the knees of the oarsmen but still they sang.