Vu Mon Falls

On Giăng Màn mountain, a day usually begins with mist rather than light. The mist fills the ravines from midnight, so thick that it is hard to tell cloud from forest. As the sky slowly brightens, a pale gray light slips through the canopy, leaf by leaf. Then the whole range appears little by little, like a curtain being drawn up.

In the middle of that curtain is Vũ Môn Falls.

The odd thing about this place is that the ear finds the falls before the eye does. All night, when the forest is at its quietest, the water keeps pouring at the same pace, never faster, never slower. It is the first sound of the day here, and also the last sound of the day before. The falls have never taken an hour off.

When the mist thins, the light gives the falls back their shape. The water does not drop in one long rush from top to bottom. It comes down in tiers. After a stretch, the stream meets a ledge of rock lying across its path. It pauses for an instant and gathers into a churning white pool, then plunges on to the next ledge below. Tier by tier, one level joins the next. Newspaper accounts put the whole falls at more than 200 meters high. That height only truly shows when you look up and see the top of the water vanish into the clouds.

The bed of the falls is 27.5 meters wide. The number sounds ordinary, but standing in front of it is another matter entirely. It is a band of white water wide enough to fill the whole field of view, and wide enough for the spray to dampen the hair of people standing far off. Wind in the valley blows upward and carries the spray with it, and the cool taste of the forest settles right on the lips.

This mountain country lies at about 1,280 to 1,300 meters above sea level. At that height, mornings are always colder than down on the plains. The air is clean and light. Every breath carries the smell of rotting leaves, damp moss and wet stone. City people have to travel a very long way to meet those smells again.

The name Giăng Màn means a curtain hung across, and it seems to describe exactly what happens all morning. Clouds drift across the middle of the mountain in long bands, covering and opening, opening and covering again. At times the falls appear whole in the sunlight. The water catches the light and glitters like a length of white silk standing upright in the forest. At other times only the sound remains, and the shape hides completely behind a veil of spray. Toward noon, the sun climbs high enough to shine straight onto the foot of the falls. Sometimes a short, thin rainbow appears in the spray. It hangs in the air for a moment, then fades.

The falls lie in Hà Tĩnh province. Their land used to be Phú Gia commune, in Hương Khê district. After the administrative boundaries were redrawn, that land became part of Hương Khê commune. The name on paper has changed, but the falls stay exactly where they were. They still pour over the same ledges of rock they poured over before there was any name at all.

In the middle of the day, this area has another story besides the falls, the story of a road. The district of Hương Khê invested in a road project. Its first phase alone was worth more than 74 billion dong. Section by section, the road was cut toward the mountains. It was slow, heavy work, done deep in the forest, on steep slopes, under the sun and rain of the great woods. But every extra meter of road shortens the distance between the falls and the people who hope to see them once in their lives.

Afternoon is the best time for telling stories. The people of this region have long had a folk verse about schools of carp that gather to leap Vũ Môn Falls. The verse has been handed down from one generation to the next. Many people know it so well that they no longer remember who taught it to them.

An old tale says that any carp able to leap Vũ Môn Falls will turn into a dragon. The tale first came from China, and the falls here carry the same name. To say it plainly, this is a folk legend, not something that really happened. Carp do not turn into dragons. But the legend carries an idea, and that idea is very real.

At the foot of the falls, it is easy to see why the story fits this place. Overhead rises a wall of water more than 200 meters high, tier stacked on tier. Each tier is one more climb to make. There is no shortcut around it. People of old looked at that wall of water and thought of hardship, and of trying with all their strength. They thought of how something small could still become something great, if it was willing to go all the way through the hardest stretch.

Then the day leans toward evening. The sunlight leaves the water first, then the rock face, and the treetops last of all. Mist rises again from the valley, exactly the way it melted away in the morning, only in reverse. The forest changes color very fast, from green to gray, then from gray to purple.

As everything else grows still, the sound of the falls seems to grow louder. In truth it is no louder than by day. It is only that at night, when the birds have gone back to their nests and the wind has dropped, no other sound competes with it. The whole old forest is left with a single sound, steady and untiring, ringing out in the dark.

Tomorrow the mist will rise and melt away again. The water will still pour white over each ledge of rock on Giăng Màn mountain. It needs no one watching to keep on flowing.