We must have slept half the day away. When we walked out the sky was dark in cloud, although it was still hours away from nightfall. The river was oppressively gloomy, a brown-gray mass of water moving sullenly under the cloud. The banks sloped slowly away from the shores, we were already a century away from Chongqing and the passing junks slopped paddles into the lifting swell. 

Our lower-class cabin was one of a file of identical bunkrooms on the bottom deck of the ferry. The ferry itself was a wedding-cake of thick old sheds, four layers of sturdily tacked-together wood and iron: despite wear, a good ship. Out on deck, the passengers were wandering around and leaning over the balconies watching the passing murkiness. They seemed hesitant to climb up to the upper levels, perhaps embarrassed to be told off by third or second class passengers. I was keen to explore and took the risk. One advantage of being a foreigner is that it's very easy to get away with that sort of thing. Suitably foreign-looking tourists can wander through all manner of hotel, party or restaurant in China; and although I'm normally of the mind to be vocally against that sort of thing (for reasons which have yet to come to light), I was in need of a shower, and sharing the spartan no-doors nudey room with several other curious males (as Hamish had only just put up with) was something I hoped to avoid if at all possible. I was lucky - after passing the hall of really lower-class passengers (sleeping on newspapers in a lobby) I found a corridor of single-room showers, lockable from the inside, with limitless hot water. More than a backpacker (were I a genuine backpacker) could hope for.

The second level had a comfortable lounge room at the front which Hamish and I examined later. We were not the only lao wai on the ferry, a pair of English girls who thought that they were sailing the whole length of the river by travelling all the way to Shanghai were on this vessel for a cheap & genuine China experience. We didn't have the heart to tell them that by getting on at Chongqing they'd missed half the river, which stretches way back into Qinghai/Tibet. We ourselves were planning to get off the boat at Yichang, the city on the Three Gorges dam. A few other Chinese gentlemen populating the lounge were moderately better off than their counterparts downstairs, and seemed to be really interested in seeing the Three Gorges, having taken the boat as an economical pilgrimage rather than a mere means of transport.

The afternoon passed slowly. The unbroken low slopes of scrub and rock would occasionally give way to settlements, some of which were large and drab cities. From the river, China seemed to lean down into the waters with great  reluctance. The banks stooped up on both sides, gray empty-looking blocks sadly perched on the stone like inner-city carpark buildings. Floating through a motionless dim mist, Hamish and I looked out over the other boats and ferries on the river that seemed to dock and pull away from the occasional congestion of rivercraft in a kind of slow motion.

We had expected that our ferry would stop a lot more times than it did. Our (by now largely ignored) guidebook had mentioned that the river ferries regularly made anchorstops at several of the many cities along the Yangtse, at each of which it was possible to disembark and explore for half an hour or so. Actually, our boat only ever pulled in once at a port, by which stage it was beginning to get dark. Hamish and I stood out on a floating iron pier as crates were lifted back and forth from the cargo hold. There were a few stalls in the lamplight, tables of oily meats and pistachio nuts - we settled for a couple of bread buns, even though they were sure to be ruined with red bean paste, and made back for the bunkrooms. The passengers weren't ones for wandering the ship at night, and the majority of bunks were already populated with dark-suited men and women with thick socks, sitting on their bunks, chatting, smoking and eating sunflower seeds. I had had the intention of taking some moments alone up on the top deck to watch Central China go past at night, but despite the abnormal hours, and the cigarette smoke, and the noise, I slept again; and Hamish, lying reading on his bunk, soon did the same.

The mist, the river, the colour of the sky, nothing had changed in the morning. I walked out on deck to see a gigantic Buddha arranged on a hillside, each part of the body made out of what appeared to be a white building, connected by a series of staircases up the mountain. A tourist attraction and religious shrine worked into a single architectural plan, it was one of those structures that symbolised the seamless marriage of ancient and modern in China, evidence of which can be seen in China on a daily basis - the farmer speaking on his cellphone in the rice paddy. A spectacular artwork in the lounge was a scene of the river and scraggy mountains towering above it; with its traditional flourishes and conservative watercolours, it could have been a thousand years old, save for the fact that the artist had thoughtfully inked in the steel communications tower on one of the highest peaks.

We were soon to reach the Three Gorges, and the ship was abuzz with something that approached excitement, in a lazy and very Chinese way. Infrequently, passengers would walk out to the nose of the ferry and quote an old poem about the Three Gorges, that I suspected had been a standard text at school. It had the ring of an incantation, a sliver of Chinese history that was a ticket to genuine participation in the spectacle we were about to see. I noticed several small groups of people in the lounge eating sunflower seeds and drinking goblets of sprite, and when one of their number went outside I had him write down the Li Bai poem, Morning Departure from Baidi City, for me, making a mental note to attempt to understand it later, once my Chinese had progressed to the appropriate level. Chinese poetry is famously awful in translation in English, devoid of the subtleties that only Chinese characters can bear, but here is a humble rendition:
 
 

Leaving Baidi, cast in blush of dawn cloud The day's passage to Jiangling a thousand miles Monkeys cry incessant from the river shores This swift boat, already ten thousand mountains beyond.

We were soon at the mouth of the first gorge. We were told that the further we passed through, the more lofty and impressive the gorges would appear. This was helpful, because in the dismal atmosphere of a downcast day on the Yangtse, the entrance to one of China's grandest natural wonders seemed exceedingly unremarkable. For those who aren't sure, a gorge is a narrow pass through a high-walled break in the land, and so I was half-expecting to be floating along the river-valley equivalent of the Grand Canyon. The Three Gorges, I discovered, are not immense cliff-faces after all, but in fact a tight series of mountains of increasing height through which the river passes. For me, at the time, this was a secret disappointment. For several hours we drifted through the gorges, each turn of the river offering views of other mountains rather like those just seen. I took a few photos and then gave up. I remembered having the same uncomfortable feeling when staring up at the peaks of Zhangjiajie, the excited and enthusiastic recommendations of foreigners and Chinese alike falling flat in the face of tall clods of rock.

I'm a city guy, I like back streets and old buildings and teenagers in weird clothes, I like being invited into people's homes and looking at their photographs, I like sitting around the table in a cafe or dining room listening to the things that interest real Chinese people: a mountain is a mountain, and despite the fact that I think that I should like going out into the countryside to look at them, I really don't. What was far more interesting was listening to the other passengers tell of their feelings at finally seeing this place, this location of Chinese legend soon to be yet another casualty of the river, soon to be what would hopefully be the last casualty of the river. With the river dammed and the gorges sunk, Those who live in the region may perhaps no longer live in the midst of an eternal, tired battle with the unpredictable surges of the Long River.

Another foreigner had gotten on the boat in the morning, an English boy who had been travelling up and down the river for several days. Tim's Chinese was markedly better than ours, he was a student at Beijing University and someone who appeared to be in China for the right reasons. Many students of Chinese are just as self-important as the expats tend to be, assuming that their (often minor) abilities in Chinese entitle them to a status somewhat above native speakers, a confidence perhaps brought on by the astonishing encouragement given out by Chinese people to students of Mandarin. Chinese people are, almost without exception, surprised and delighted to hear a foreigner speak a few words of Chinese, and the ability is worth more than money in some situations. The students who take this praise too seriously become ugly participants in Chinese culture, and the blushing grin of a self-crowned lao wai in a Beijing nightclub is unmistakable, the gyrations of his majesty in the crowd of ordinary Chinese enough to make more humble foreign students almost want to choose another language, for fear of an association with, or worse becoming, something of the like. Tim chatted with us about his courses in Bei Da,the most prestigious Chinese school in the country, and about the abuse of cultural advantages (available along with the status of a fluent Chinese-speaking foreigner) often taken by some of the students there, often of a sexual nature. Tim was clearly far more interested in the Chinese language than he was in bad behaviour, and excitedly drew the latest character he'd mastered for us: a pictogram of rain on the road, signifying exposure. 

Outside, we watched the passing scenery of the gorges, dense fog lying on the river like a shroud. High on the slopes were markers indicating the maximum and minimum expected heights of the river after damming. It was surprising just how many constructions lay beneath the new water levels, old homes, pathways to hidden temples in the steep cliffs of some of the more treacherous mountainsides. I tried to gauge my own emotional reaction to the thought of these ancient places swallowed in the gray flood water, given that I had spoken with so many people with passionate views on the issue. Before coming to China, I'd only heard the side presented by the Western media, and hadn't anticipated the deep, emotional defence of the dam that local Chinese people would give. Like so many of the deeply anti-Chinese views often held by Westerners (regarding the government, Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen, and a host of other issues) it's difficult not to wonder at the arrogance with which Westerners presume to preach at Chinese people, whom they assume are brainwashed by their state-controlled media. It's difficult not to sympathise with Chinese who are tired of hearing Westerners all rant about the same tired issues, wondering who it is who's been brainwashing us.

Western propoganda too frequently casts the Chinese, and often the majority of the human race, as a force over and against nature. They do not allow for the perspectives of other cultures which try to find a more practical balance between long-term preservation and urgent human need. It's not that the Chinese disrespect the Three Gorges in any way, indeed the reverse is true. Its that the problems of the millions who live along the Yangtses shores need to be addressed regardless of the sacrifice this entails. Humanity is not a force against nature, we are come out from nature and are part of it, and have a determination for survival that is a legacy of our heritage as creatures of nature. The Chinese, and all peoples of the world, will lose the gorges as a result of this project, and they feel this loss acutely. But the needs that have moved the hearts of those involved in the project must take precedence over even ecological concerns.

The massive dam at the Three Gorges will certainly be built, despite the indignant condemnation of the project by foreign parties, and I didn't get the impression, sailing along the miserable Yangtse, that the loss would be as great as supposed. I certainly heard no symphony of monkey squeals resonating like bassoons or see any brilliant dawn clouds like Li Bai had all those centuries before when he wrote Morning Departure from Baidi City. I wasn't struck by the towering magnificence of the mounts or the glorious surge of the river. This is because the original majestic purity of the Three Gorges as it was in the time of Li Bai was long gone, and the industries and settlements along the river banks have long since become eyesores. In fact, it seemed to me that the civilisation along the river valley was rotten and wanting, that it would in some respects not be criminal after all to bury the place before the area's reputation as a shrine of deep Chinese cultural significance become even more spoilt and polluted. At least once these stocky blackened blocks are underwater, they will be able to command a respect in the mourning of them that they could not hope for on the sopping slopes.