Chapter 57 — Elves, Currency, and Irrigation

Then an ancient and effective machine surfaced in Gao Yang's mind: "Have any of you heard of a thing called a waterwheel?"

Hetty, Norris, and the knight Philip wore three identical looks of blank bewilderment.

As expected, no one had heard of such a thing.

Gao Yang looked at Hetty. "Paper and pen?"

Once he had them, Gao Yang began sketching a simple diagram. It was a tall, wheel-shaped thing borne on spokes, and fixed around the rim of the "wheel" were evenly spaced, slanted tubes and wooden boards. On one side of the wheel he drew a channel running off to a distance.

With time short, he drew only part of the structure, and only as a sketch—but this simple, wondrous machine rested on a principle of astonishing simplicity, and a brief explanation sufficed: "This is a waterwheel. The river flows beneath it, strikes these boards, and sets the wheel turning. The wheel carries the tubes, filled with water, up to the top, and the water pours into this channel. The process repeats without end, and the water is lifted to a height. How high it can lift depends on how large the wheel is built—so long as the materials hold."

Then he added: "Of course, this is only a sketch, and the principle is simple. On this foundation one could build many more models..."

Hetty was by now quite beyond speech. She was utterly captivated by this simple, impossible thing.

By the simplest reasoning she could see the machine was bound to be useful—and yet, before she saw this sketch, she had truly never imagined such a thing could exist in the world.

It needed no manpower, and no touch of any power beyond the ordinary. It could work day and night without pause, doing work that would take many serfs to accomplish—and what drove it was the power of nature itself.

All at once she felt "beauty" in this simple machine—a word that had nothing whatever to do with that crude, clumsy structure.

Yet Gao Yang was still sighing. "It's a pity there's no bamboo here. With bamboo, building it would be far simpler..."

Hetty did not catch it. "Hm? What did you just say?"

"No, nothing," Gao Yang waved a hand. "About this machine—do you have any other ideas?"

Hetty was about to say it was a stroke of genius when she noticed Norris beside her had picked up a pen and begun sketching on a blank sheet. The old farmer drew as he spoke: "Building it directly on the banks of the White Water River would leave it badly affected by the current, and it'd be useless in the dry season. If we could dig a separate channel off to the side, then in the dry season..."

Noticing the sudden quiet around him, Norris gave a start and came back to himself. He flung the pen away in panic and shrank back, trembling all over. "Master, I was only..."

But Gao Dai's words caught him completely off guard: "Can you write?"