Along the Yangtze River every few kilometres upstream from Wuhan you can see ominous white squares with red Chinese characters high on the river bank.
They mark the future water level after the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.
The Chinese leadership sees it as an engineering triumph to tame nature, stop floods that have killed 300,000 people this century and to generate 18,200 megawatts of electricity, equal to about 10 big coal-fired power stations or 50 million tonnes of coal a year. The 1.6km-long concrete wall and resulting 600-kilometre-long dam will be completed in 2009 and cost $30 billion.
It will enable larger cargo vessels to navigate from the coast more than 1500km upstream to Chongqing, which with its 25 million people is one of the largest cities on earth.
But the critics say it will displace 1.3 million people, flood beautiful gorges and important cultural sites, and kill endangered animals. They say the economics are dubious and siltation will necessitate expensive redesign work. It will flood existing coal mines and other polluted industrial sites which will contaminate the waters of the new dam.
The lack of river flow in the new dam will result in the build up of industrial and chemical and millions of tonnes of human and animal waste every year.
The three lesser gorges on the tributary Da Ning River (more picturesque, indeed, than the three main Yangtze gorges) will go.
Cruising up the river over four days earlier this month I saw the intense activity below those ominous water-level marks.
Everywhere on the river people were taking stone and mud for building or bring coal and produce from land to boats.
Yangtze is a highway of water, a liquid conveyor belt of industry. It flows fast and brown.
Diesel-engined tugs belch black smoke as they lug wares up and down the river. There is even a hovercraft. Ferries ply people. On the bank people sell food and tourist trinkets of cheap stone and artfully carved false fossils.
Every so often a tributary with a deep gorge pours clean water into the huge brown river. The clear water is swallowed by the brown.
Great barges tied together carry coal, stone, concrete, wood.
On the bank small units of labour struggle with goods in and out of the highway of water.
Tiny fields, unterraced, grow precarious crops. Terracing is futile because floods will only take them away. The Yangtze has more than 10 times the silt of the Nile. I swam in the Nile at Aswan. It was cold, fast flowing and clear; exact opposite of how you imagine the Nile. Even in Cairo the water was less opaque than the Yangtze, in which only the ship-wrecked and political leaders who want to deny their age would even think of swimming.
Above is the reality behind the Chinese painting style — sheer cliffs with spidery vegetation silhouetted the edge of peaks.
All day and half the night there is noise.
Sometimes it is a clink and chip of men quarrying stone on the bank for building work; sometimes it is the woosh-crunch of a coal truck unloading or the clunking of shovels loading coal into baskets to be balanced on poles over the shoulders. Men made minuscule by muscular work in heaps of coal that dwarf them. Tiny figures of yellow sweat against the black and dirt. On $20 a week.
These noises are interrupted by the hoot of deep horns from the throats of larger vessel or the high-pitched power of a hovercraft siren.
In the background is the incessant swish-swash of the bows of our vessel cutting through the water and the regular hum of the big diesel engine with its two large exhaust pipes belching black smoke unavoidably and incessantly into the camera view-finder.
Then I hear the helicopter-style phutter-phutter-phutter of medium boats and the lesser roar for simpler craft with car engines whose drive shaft has been jerry-rigged into an exposed gearless propeller shaft.
There is the clang of feet on the plate steel of the upper deck.
Ashore you hear loudspeakers belching advertising slogans in the place of the equally senseless political slogans of two decades ago.
And then there is the Chinese “music” piped from passing tourist ferries.
The sounds are carried more easily across the water and mists of the Yangtze River — a ribbon of noisy activity made more frenetic by the people extracting the last stone and coal before the impending flood, 40 metres in the first gulp in 2003 and a further 40 metres in 2009.
There is no silence. The only peace is in listening, analysing and identifying the discordant noises like some industrial ornithologist.
And downstream the work continues on the wall that will drown it all, making small hillocks of the gorges’ mighty cliffs and creating a vast Stalinist monument to the Chinese leadership which may ultimately do more harm than good.