The Waters Rise

In the days when Emperor Yao ruled from his capital on the plain, the heavens opened and did not close. Rain fell for months, and then for years. The rivers rose out of their beds and wandered across the land without purpose. The people fled to the hilltops and lived in huts of brush, and when the hills themselves were covered, they climbed into the trees and hung there until the trees rotted beneath them.

Emperor Yao sat on his throne and watched the water reach the foot of the palace steps. He was an old man, and he had ruled wisely, but no wisdom of his could command the sky. He called his ministers together and asked them whom he should send against the flood. They named a man called Gun, of the Xia clan, who was strong and stubborn and said he knew what to do.

Gun went out against the water as a general goes against an army. He built dikes. He raised walls of earth and stone wherever the water threatened. He said the flood was an enemy, and enemies must be stopped. For nine years he labored, and the walls went up, and the water rose behind them, and when at last it found a breach it came through with a rage it had not shown before.

The land was worse than it had been before he began. The fields he had tried to protect were under deeper water than ever. The people, who had been starving on the hills, now starved there too, and their numbers thinned. Gun came back to the emperor empty-handed, and the emperor, who had waited nine years, was done with waiting.

They say Gun was put to death on Feather Mountain for his failure. He had, the stories say, stolen from the gods a magical earth that grows by itself, hoping to build his walls higher; but the theft did not save him, and the earth he had stolen did not hold the water. He left behind him a son, still a young man, whom he had taken with him to the banks of the rivers.

The son's name was Yu. He had watched his father's work from the beginning. He had carried earth himself, when he was old enough to carry it, and he had seen the walls break. He had stood, through the long rainy years, and watched the water do what water does: it does not fight; it waits. It finds the lowest path. It takes whatever you build and buries it.

When his father was killed, Yu did not weep where the court could see him. He went out alone, to the bank of the greatest of the rivers, and stood there a long time, looking at the brown, heavy water. He was not thinking of revenge. He was thinking. His father had tried to stop the river. What if the river did not wish to be stopped? What if it wished only to be shown its way?

He went back to the emperor and asked for the work. The old man looked at him — a thin, weathered young man, his hands already hard from his father's labor — and gave it to him. There was no one else to ask. And so Yu, who was not yet thirty, took up the burden that had killed his father, and went out to meet the flood again.