ural engrossment in
the common doings of the _wu-pan_,[C] saw the reflection of the sun on
the waters, now turned to a livid murkiness, deepening with a
threatening ink-like aspect as the river rushed voluminously past our
tiny floating haven. Strangely silenced were we by this weird terror,
and watched and listened, chained to the deck by a thousand mingled
fears and fascinations, which breathed upon our nerves like a chill
wind. As we became accustomed then to the yellow darkness, we beheld
about the landscape a spectral look, and the sepulchral sound of the
moving thunder seemed the half-muffled clang of some great iron-tongued
funeral bell. Then came the rain, introduced swiftly by the deafening
clatter of another thunder crash that made one stagger like a ship in a
wild sea, and we strained our eyes to gaze into a visionary chasm
cleaved in twain by the furious lightning. Playing upon the face of the
unruffled river, with a brilliancy at once awful and enchanting, this
singular flitting and wavering of the heavenly electricity, as it
flashed haphazardly around all things, threw about one an illumination
quite indescribable.

For hours we sat upon a beam athwart the afterdeck, in silence drinking
in the strange phenomenon. We watched, after a small feed of curry and
rice, long into the dark hours, when the thunder had passed us by, and
in the distant booming one could now imagine the lower notes streaming
forth from some great solemn organ symphony. The fierce lightning
twitched, as it danced in and out the crevices--inwards, outwards,
upwards, then finally lost in one downward swoop towards the river,
tearing open the liquid blackness with its crystal blade of fire. The
rain ceased not. But soon the moon, peeping out from the tops of a
jagged wall above us, looking like a soiled, half-melted snowball, shone
full down the far-stretching gorge, and now its broad lustre shed
itself, like powdered silver, over the whole scene, so that one could
have imagined oneself in the living splendor of some eternal sphere of
ethereal sweetness. And so it might have been had the rain abated--a
curious accompaniment to a moonlight night. Down it came, straight and
determined and businesslike, in the windless silence, dancing like a
shower of diamonds of purest brilliance on the background of the placid
waters.

Very beautiful, reader, for a time. But would that the rain had been all
moonshine!

Glorious was it to revel in for a