Sect Year 4 · sixth month · day 20 · Ketch Shoal, the new well behind the birth-house, on the flat where the old water tank silted
Gao Wen had been digging for nine days. He dug with a spade and a bucket on a rope. The rope ran up over a pole lashed across two uprights, so that each bucket came up heavy with grey mud and sand and the cold shine of wet stone. He couldn’t kneel on the bad leg.
He stood at the lip with the leg braced against the timber curb and drove the spade down with both arms, and when he had worked a man’s length of shaft he sat on a stool at the edge and rested with his eyes shut until his breathing came back. The shaft was a man and a half deep now. The water had not come yet.
The flat behind the birth-house was low and bare. At the spring tide the sea covered it, and at the low it lay grey and cracked like old leather, with the stilts standing over it on their black legs. The old wells along the lower lane still ran sweet, the sold water in them as clean as ever, but the water tank had silted and the sea had got into its lining.
