Gathering the Water Read Online Free PDF

carting and reburial.
    â€˜Where are your own family buried?’ he said.
    â€˜My parents in Hampshire.’
    He shook his head, puzzled; the place did not exist.
    And Helen, dead at twenty-three, at her family plot in Shrewsbury.
    â€˜You have no wife?’
    â€˜My mother died when I was a child.’
    â€˜No wife or childer of your own? You’re a grown man. Were you never married? No man here, unless he is mad or cast out, is ever unwed by the time he reaches twenty-five. And even if he is mad or cast out he might still hope to be wed by thirty.’
    Dead almost a year now, three years to the day of our meeting. My fiancée. And I wish with all my heart that it were otherwise.
    â€˜They won’t come out easy,’ he said.
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜Our dead. This land is chopped out, not dug. It goes back down like iron. No plough was ever used here.’
    I pitied him the lack of a skull to hold and a ham-bone to shake in my face.

 
11
    Soon after entering this profession I was told the story of the Chinese city of Hangzhou by one of my teachers. This fabulously wealthy city was at its most magnificent during the tenth century and contained a great palace. It was a city surrounded by extensive lakes, the water of which was controlled and exploited by massive and complicated waterworks.
    Sometime during the tenth century there was excessive rainfall, and flooding took place in the mountains to the west of the city. The level of the Great West Lake rose alarmingly and went on rising. Eventually a tidal wave rose at a great distance and swept towards Hangzhou, ever growing as it came, and driven by strong winds until it rose to twice the height of the city walls.
    The governor at that time was a man called Qian Liu. Messengers came to him hourly with reports of this approaching wave. Thousands fled their homes towards the east. Qian Liu was petitioned to take action to save the city and the palace. He climbed a high tower and saw for himself the great and unstoppable wave, by then grown even higher. Qian Liu considered through the whole of a sleepless night how best to save the city, and the following morning, as the wall of water completed its journey towards Hangzhou, he sent out four thousand of his finest archers to line the shore of the lake, to form into double ranks there, to draw back their bows and then to fire their arrows into the wave the instant before it broke over them, and in this way destroy it.
    Following our laughter, one of my fellow students asked if the plan had proved successful. Our teacher told us that no one had survived to say whether it had worked or not. There was more laughter. Then our teacher asked which of us, being in possession of four thousand archers and nothing more, and seeing what Qian Liu saw, would have done anything differently.

 
12
    There is a place here, an abandoned barn called Low Syke, which is to be the first of the buildings lost to the reservoir. It stands in the valley bottom close upriver to the dam, and there is now a daily increase in the water filling the braided channels around it. This has not yet risen above the unfaced foundations of the dam, nor to the painted marker which will measure a depth against the dam of six feet. A pity this was not raised higher than the height of a man. Even here there must be those who attain that height.
    Low Syke was once a farm, then latterly a barn for winter provender. The water has already mounted its worn step and spilled inside, most of it to soak instantly through the earthen floor, but still inside.
    A crowd has gathered to witness this first identifiableloss. Futile to point out to them that the structure was already derelict, its roof flags sagging and ready to fall with another winter, or that, being so low in the valley, it had already been inundated in a succession of past floods.
    I considered it no less than my duty to mark the occasion with my presence. And, needless to say, there