A Different Way

Yu did not begin with shovels. He began with walking. For three years he walked the land on foot, and on rafts when the water was too deep, and he went where no one had gone because no one had survived to come back and say what it was like. He climbed the mountains that rose from the flood like islands, and he looked out from their tops and tried to read the water as a scholar reads a book.

He saw what his father had never understood. The rivers were not angry. They were lost. The rains had scoured away their old channels; the silt had blocked their mouths; the water, given no path, had spread itself out over the whole plain, lost and confused, looking for a way down to the sea. A wall would only make it lose its temper. What it needed was a road.

He came back to the court with a plan that astonished the ministers. He would not build walls. He would dig. He would cut channels through the low places, he would break through the dams of silt, he would lead the great rivers one by one — the Yang, the Yellow, the Wei — and show them the way down, so that they might run of their own accord into the Eastern Sea and be done with it.

The ministers stared. To dig, they said, is to invite the water in. Your father built up, and even he failed. You would tear down? Yu answered that his father had built up against the water, and the water had won, because water always wins against a wall. He would build with the water, not against it. The earth he moved would be earth the water itself would carry.

The emperor gave him the laborers. There were not many — the people were half-starved — but he took what he was given. He divided them into bands. He went before them himself, at dawn, with a hoe over his shoulder, and he did not come back until the light had failed. His clothes rotted on his back. His hair hung lank. The skin on his hands split and calloused until he could no longer feel the hoe in them.

They say his hands became like a bird's claws, from gripping the tool for years without rest. They say his legs lost all the hair, from wading in cold water day after day, until the skin was blue and peeled. He did not speak of himself. He spoke only of the channels, of which way this water wished to run, of the mountain that must be broken to let a river through.

Where the land was hard, they split rock. Where the land was soft, they dug through mud. Yu measured every channel with his own body: he lay down across it to judge its depth, he walked its length to judge its fall. He learned to read the slope of the ground the way a farmer reads the weather, and he chose his courses not by where a wall looked strongest, but by where the water, given half a chance, would go.

It was slow work. The ministers, watching from the capital, doubted. But the people who worked beside him did not doubt, because they saw that he did not command them to do what he would not do himself, and because, slowly, they began to see the water recede. The channels he had dug began, here and there, to carry it away.

And so the years went on. The thirteen years that Yu spent against the flood are not counted as a single labor but as a long, patient war of attrition, in which one man's will was set against the oldest, heaviest force in the world, and won, not by force, but by listening.