Sect Year 3 · twelfth month · day 28 · the new ford below the broken Span, Ammel Gorge
The river ran hard in its old channel. Its noise filled the gorge from wall to wall, and the rock threw it back a moment late, so that every sound seemed to arrive twice. Lin stood on the south bank and listened. For sixty years the valley had been built to keep this water out. Now the water ran where the valley had always been, and the stones the flood had left were heaped on both banks in piles taller than a man. Somebody had carried them there by hand, one at a time, for weeks.
The Span stood a short walk upstream, still fixed to both banks by its grey abutments, though the arch between them was broken. Its keystone was gone. The centre had come down into the gap and lay in the current in heaps of cut stone. The two halves of the arch leaned out over the water toward each other like two exhausted men who had stopped a stride short.
Lin looked at the break for a while. He thought he could see where the pin had been, a dark seam in the stone. He didn’t look at it long. The rail that had run along the top of the span was still there, bent out over the water in one long curve, and he didn’t look at that either.
