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every inch cultivated, the bright green rows interspersed with stripes of burnt orange earth. We pass two boys playing on the banks. Beside them is a bamboo raft, neatly constructed, tied together with rope. One boy is naked, the other is wearing white underwear. When they see us they jump into the river and swim toward us, shouting. Graham translates: “I am a big fish. I am swimming to your boat. I am going to eat you up. Fear me, small boat, for I am the big fish of the rushing river.”
    “They’ll grow up to be poets,” I say.
    Graham waves to them. “Or criminals.”
    A little farther down the river, a girl is standing in a tree. She wears a brown dress that skims her skinny knees. Carefully she turns her back to us. The limb upon which she is standing shakes, it is very thin, I am sure it will collapse beneath her. She shouts something into the weeping willows, which seem to sway at the sound of her voice. An elderly woman emerges from the green. She smiles and waves at the boat, shouts, and then the girl begins waving too.
    “What are they saying?”
    “The woman wants us to come to shore,” Graham says. “She wants to sell us tortoise wine.”
    Oxen bathe near the muddy banks of the river, their corpulent bodies rolling in the brown water. Here and there a single ox is led along by its owner, its neck encircled in a tattered piece of rope. When wet, the oxen are slick and black, their broad backs shining. When dry, their skin is gray and dusty, and they all have an ancient, worn-out look. The sight of them becomes so familiar that, when I spot a bloated lump drifting downstream toward our ship, I think it must be a dead ox. But it is much too small for that.
    I point toward the floating object. “Look.”
    Graham has already seen it and is leaning over the rail to get a closer look. “Is it?” he asks, obviously thinking the same thing I’m thinking.
    “Hard to tell.”
    Finally we come within a few yards of it. The body lies facedown; the gray shirt and pants balloon with water. The only visible flesh is the grotesque back of a neck, and a pallid foot puffed to twice its normal size. “Oh my God.”
    “Better get used to it,” Graham says. “You’re going to see a lot of them. During the rainy season, people working on the dikes get washed into the river and drown. On the rougher parts of the river it’s not uncommon for someone to fall out of a sampan and simply disappear. Then, of course, there are the suicides.”
    “Doesn’t someone go looking for them?”
    “Rarely. The Chinese are rather fatalistic about this river. The families mourn, of course, but seldom does anyone try to find the body.”
    “Why not?”
    “It would be near to impossible. British travel logs from the early part of this century are filled with accounts of people going overboard or being swept from the riverbank. Even in those cases when it would’ve been easy to reach in and rescue the drowning person, the Chinese invariably steered their boats away. In those days, anyone who rescued someone from the river was responsible for that person for the rest of his life. No one could afford another mouth to feed.”
    A wave catches the body, rolling it over like a big floating toy. The other foot comes into view, clad in a red cloth shoe. I look into the face of a young man, puffed and pale and strangely lifelike despite the stillness of the features. The eyes are closed, the skin slick.
    “What should we do?” I say.
    “There’s nothing we can do.”
    “Shouldn’t we inform the crew?”
    As if on cue, Elvis Paris appears beside us. “Very inviting scenery, yes?”
    “We just saw a dead body.”
    Elvis Paris doesn’t even pause to consider the possibility. “I think there are no bodies here.”
    “Look.” I point to the corpse, which is drifting away from us, moving slowly downstream. Anyone can tell from the red shoe, the clothes, the hands that have just come into view and look as if they are waving, that the