He had a point, no doubt; and knew more about the empire than anyone else. Still, Ibrahim persevered. Meanwhile more refugees came pouring east, until the Gansu Corridor, Shaarixi, and Xining were all crowded with new arrivals – all Muslim, but not necessarily friendly towards each other, and oblivious of their Chinese hosts. Lanzhou appeared to be prospering, the markets were jammed, the mines and foundries and smithies and factories were all pouring out armaments, and new machinery of all kinds, threshers, power looms, carts; but the ramshackle west end of town now extended along the bank of the Yellow River for many li, and both banks of the Tao River were slums, where people lived in tents, or in the open air. No one in town recognized the place any more, and everyone stayed behind locked doors at night, if they were prudent.

Child of mine coming into this world Be careful where you take yourself. So many ways for things to go wrong; Sometimes I grow afraid. If only we lived in the Age of Great Peace I could be happy to see your innocent face Watching the geese fly south in the fall.

Once Kang was helping Ibrahim clean up the clutter of books and paper, inkstones and brushes in his study, and she stopped to read one of his pages.

'History can be seen as a series of collisions of civilizations, and it is these collisions that create progress and new things. It may not happen at the actual point of contact, which is often racked by disruption and war, but behind the lines of conflict, where the two cultures are most trying to define themselves and prevail, great progress is often made very swiftly, with works of permanent distinction in arts and technique. Ideas flourish as people try to cope, and over time the competition yields to the stronger ideas, the more flexible, more generous ideas. Thus Fulan, India and Yingzhou are prospering in their disarray, while China grows weak from its monolithic nature, despite the enormous infusion of gold from across the Dahai. No single civilization could ever progress; it is always a matter of two or more colliding. Thus the waves on the shore never rise higher than when the backwash of some earlier wave falls back into the next one incoming, and a white line of water jets up to a startling height. History may not resemble so much the seasons of a year, as waves in the sea, running this way and that, crossing, making patterns, sometimes a triple peak, a very Diamond Mountain of cultural energy, for a time.'

Kang put the sheet down, looked at her husband fondly. 'If only it were true,' she said to herself.

'What?' He looked up.

'You are a good man, husband. But it may be you have taken on an impossible task, out of your goodness.'

Then, in the forty sixth year of the Qianlong Emperor's reign, rain fell for all of the third month. Everywhere the land was flooded, just at the time when Kang Tongbi was nearing her confinement. Whether general rebellion across the west broke out because of the misery caused by the floods, or was calculatedly initiated to take advantage of the disaster's confusion, no one could say. But Muslim insurgents attacked town after town, and while Shiite and Wahhabi and Jahriya and Khafiya factions murdered each other in mosque and alleyway, Qing banners too went down before the furious attacks of the rebels. It became so serious that the bulk of the imperial army was rumoured to be heading west; but meanwhile the devastation was widespread, and in Gansu the food began to run out.

Lanzhou was again besieged, this time by a coalition of immigrant Muslim rebels of all sects and national origins. Ibrahim's household did everything it could to protect the mistress of the house in her late pregnancy. But even this high in its watershed, the Yellow River had risen dangerously with the rains, and being located at the confluence of the Yellow and the Tao made things worse for their compound. The town's high bluff began to look not so high. It was a frightening sight to see the rivers risen so startlingly, brown and foaming at the very tops of their banks. Finally, on the fifteenth day of the tenth month, when an imperial army was a day's march downstream, and relief of the siege therefore almost in sight, the rain fell harder than ever, and the rivers rose and spilled over their banks.

Someone, rebels everyone assumed, chose this worst of all moments to break the dam upstream on the Tao River, sending an immense muddy flow of water ripping down the watershed, over the Tao's already overtopped banks, rushing into the Yellow River and even backing up the larger stream, so that all was brown water, spreading up into the hills on each side of the narrow river valley. By the time the imperial army arrived the whole of Lanzhou was covered with a sheet of dirty brown water, to knee height, and rising still.

Ibrahim had already gone out to meet the imperial army, taken there by the governor of Lanzhou to consult with the new command, and to help them find rebel authorities to negotiate with. So as the water rose inexorably around the walls of Ibrahim's compound, there were only the women of the household and a few servants to deal with the flood.

The compound wall and sandbags at the gates appeared to be adequate to protect them, but then word of the broken dam and its surge of water was shouted into the compound by people departing for higher ground.

'Come quickly,' Zunli cried. 'We must get to higher ground too. We must leave now!'

Kang Tongbi ignored him. She was busy stuffing trunks with her papers and with Ibrahim's. There were rooms and rooms full of books and papers, as Zunli exclaimed when he saw what she was doing. There wasn't time to save them all.

'Then help me,' Kang grated, working at a furious clip.

'How will we move it all?'

'Put the boxes in the sedan chair, quickly.'

'But how will you go?'

'I will walk! Go! Go! Go!'

They stuffed boxes. 'This isn't right,' Zunli protested, looking at Kang's rounded form. 'Ibrahim would want you to leave. He wouldn't worry about these books!'

'Yes he would!' she shouted. 'Pack! Get the rest in here and pack!'

Zunli did what he could. A wild hour of racing around in a pure panic had him and the other servants exhausted, but Kang Tongbi was just getting started.

Finally she relented, and they hurried out the front gate of the compound, sloshing immediately into knee high brown water that poured into the compound until they closed the gate against it. It was a strange sight indeed to see the whole town become a shallow foamy brown lake. The sedan chair was piled so full with books and papers that it took all the servants jammed together under the hoist bars to lift and move it. A low, hair raising boom of moving water shook the air. The foaming brown lake that covered both rivers and the town extended into the hills on all sides, and Lanzhou itself was completely awash. The servant girls were crying, filling the air with shrieks, shouts, screams. Pao was nowhere to be seen. Thus it was that only a mother's ears heard a single boy crying out.

Kang realized: she had forgotten her own son. She turned and hopped back inside the gate that had been pushed open by water, unnoticed by the servants staggering under the loaded sedan chair.

She splashed through rushing water to Shih's room: the compound itself was already floored by the opaque brown flood.

Shih had apparently been hiding under his bed, and the water had flushed him out and onto it, where he curled tip terrified. 'Help! Mother, help me!'

'Come quickly then!'

'I can't! I can't!'

'I can't carry you, Shih. Come on! The servants are all gone, it's just you and me now!'

'I can't!' And he began to wail, balled up on his bed like a threeyear old.

Kang stared at him. Her right hand even jerked towards the gate, as if leaving ahead of the rest of her. She snarled then, grabbed the boy by the ear and jerked him howling to his feet.