THE RIVER
From the vast and yellow river my eyes return to our leadsman crouching at the side of the boat. Turning the line in his fist with a regular motion, he sends the lead in full flight across the muddy waters.
As the elements of a parallelogram unite, so water expresses the power of a country reduced to geometrical lines. Each drop is a fugitive calculation, a visible measurement always crossing the circumferential slope; and, having found the lowest point of a given area, it joins a current which flows with more impetus toward the deeper center of a still larger circle. This stream is immense in its force and extent. It is the outlet of a world. It is slow-moving Asia pouring forth. Powerful as the sea, this river has a destination and a source. The current is without branches or tributaries. We shall have mounted all these days in vain! We shall never reach the fork! Always before us, cleaving the countryside with irresistible power and volume, the river evenly divides the horizon of the West.
All water seems attractive to us, but certainly, more than the blue and virgin sea, this appeals to that in us which is between the flesh and the soul,—our human current charged with virtue and with spirit, the deep and burning blood. Here is one of the great laboring veins of the world, one of the arteries for the distribution of life. Beneath me I feel moving the protoplasm which strives and destroys, which fills and fashions us. And, while we remount this enormous river which melts about us into the gray sky and swallows up our route, it is the entire earth which we receive, the Earth of the earth: Asia, mother of all men, central, solid, primordial. Oh abundant bosom! Surely I see it, and it is vainly that the grass everywhere disguises it; I have penetrated this mystery. As water with a purple stain might attest some undeniable wound, so the earth has impregnated this river with her substance. It is solely of gold.
The sky is lowering. The clouds move slowly toward the north. To right and left I see a somber Mesopotamia. Here are neither villages nor cultivation; only here and there, between the stripped trees, four or five primitive huts, some fishing-tackle on the bank, and a ruined boatwhich moves—a miserable vessel hoisting a rag for sail! Extermination has passed over this country, and the river which carries opulent life and nourishment waters a region no less deserted than where the first waters issued from Paradise, when Man, hollowing the horn of an ox, delivered the first rude, harsh cry in the echoless wastes.