To my brilliant and progressive Princess Celestia, in the 603rd YR, my 7,237th letter

Our rapid progress up the river is over. The rainy season has come and the river begins to flood its banks. The rice fields are being flooded and this renews them, as the local tell. However, navigating the river has become treacherous, without strong winds we make little progress against the current and so I despair of reaching the dragon nesting area with our little ship. Still we have much time and some diversions can be explored.

Once again, I play the role of porter, carrying Miss Broom’s painting materials. It affords me opportunity to hear more local legends of dragons. And for her, I think she enjoys being treated like some type of goddess who descended from the stars to grace the local villages.

Brush Broom has been doing what she calls a ‘study’ of white fishing birds. She calls them egrets. They walk in the shallow water looking for fish to snap up. Broom’s drawings try to capture the majesty of their stride and the balance of their fishing in the grand circle of life. We are amazed that she can use green paints to draw white birds. The effect is chilling.
In another group, she did a series on egrets and their nests. They have to be high enough off the rising level of water not to flood, but low enough to it so the birds reach shallow water.

In another series of paintings, she has a bird (not a egret she says) defending its nest against a tiger. The tiger pounces and claws at the air while the bird blocks the blows with her feet and wings. I would call these sequences some type of dance.

Another type of bird Broom is studying is the cormorant. This black bird reminds me of a raven because of its intelligence. They fish by diving into the water and swimming after their dinner. According to some there are many more on other rivers than the Yellow.

It is the fine grain clay or loess that gives the Yellow river color. At first when we came in from the sea, I thought I was imaging that the river was actually higher than the surrounding countryside. However, this was indeed the case as the river is depositing more loess here than washing downstream. Levees have built up on both sides to channel the flow and drop more loess which contributes to the bottom of the river being higher than the plains. Naturally, when any of the levees break flooding occurs, and sometimes the river changes her route to the sea. We are in an area called Shandong (or Henan) near the community of Jina; forgive me if my spelling is not exact. The local ‘official’ expressed dismay when he came to understand our intent to navigate the river up into the Bagan Har Mountains. He did warn us of cataracts, falls, and rapids. He graciously empowered us with letters of writ authorizing our attempt, but he doesn’t think we will get far. He doesn’t know about the special attachments to our little boat that Halter Zeppelin developed and tested with me. The official did suggest that if we made it past the Xiolangdi and Sanmen waterfalls, we should follow the Wei River toward Xi’an instead of the Yellow river.

With all my generosity, loyalty, kindness, humor, and trustworthiness, Sum-po-neigh Knot Yew.

Author's Note

Loess is indeed a fine grain clay regularly deposited along the levees of the Yellow River. Chinese names come from a variety of sources and refer to actual places, although some no longer remain as the River has been dammed and modified by the PRC's industrialization of the area.