That monkey, there among the hills, could already walk and run and leap; it ate the grasses and trees, drank from the mountain streams, gathered mountain flowers and sought out the fruit of the trees.

The register changes completely. After cosmic arithmetic, a diet: 食草木，飲澗泉，採山花，覓樹果 — four beats, four verbs, plain food (覓 mì, to hunt out). 卻會 notes how quickly he came into his powers. The creature born at the axis of creation is now just a young animal on a hillside, and the book is in no hurry about it.

With wolves and creeping things it kept company, with tigers and leopards it ran in a pack, with river-deer and stags it made friends, and with gibbons and monkeys it was kin.

A second four-beat run, this one of company, and it climbs: 為伴 companions, 為群 a pack, 為友 friends, 為親 kin (為 reads wéi throughout). 狼蟲 is a catch-all for "wolves and wild things," 獐 (zhāng) is the river-deer, and 獼 (mí) is the macaque of 獼猴. He belongs here completely. Nothing sets him apart yet.

By night it lodged beneath the rocky cliffs, and by morning it roamed among the peaks and caves.

Night and morning balanced against each other. 朝 reads zhāo, "morning," paired against 夜, "night" — not cháo, "court"; 宿 (sù) is to lodge for the night.

Truly it was a case of: 'In the mountains there is no calendar; when the cold has passed, one knows not the year.'

One of the most quoted couplets in Chinese about dropping out of the world. 甲子 is the first pair in the sixty-term cycle used for dating, so "no 甲子 in the mountains" means no calendar at all: you know the cold has ended, but not which year ended with it. (子 here is the cyclical sign zǐ, full tone, not the neutral suffix.) It is a paradise note, and the chapter is about to spoil it.

One day, when the weather was blazing hot, it was escaping the heat with the troop of monkeys, all of them frolicking in the shade of the pines.

一朝 is "one day" (朝 again zhāo). 避暑 is escaping the summer heat, and 頑耍 (wán shuǎ) is romping about — 頑 in its colloquial "play" sense, not "stubborn." A hot afternoon and nothing to do. That is how the plot starts.

Just look at them, every one:

你看他, "just look at him," is the storyteller turning to his audience and pointing. It always means a set-piece is coming. 一個個 is "every last one of them."

Leaping the trees, scaling the branches; picking the blossoms, seeking the fruit;

What follows is a 賦-style catalogue of monkeys at play, built from short matched phrases — the written equivalent of a long slow pan across a troop of animals. 攀 (pān) is to grab hold and haul yourself up.

flinging pellets, playing at knucklebones;

彈子 takes 彈 as the noun dàn, a pellet or marble, not the verb tán. 邷麼兒 (wǎ me er) is a colloquial name for a children's game played with pebbles or knucklebones — jacks, essentially (compare 抓子兒). These are playground games.

scampering in sand-pits, stacking up little pagodas;

窩 (wō) is a hollow or pit and 砌 (qì) is to stack up. Sandpits and sandcastles, in other words — except that the monkeys build pagodas.

chasing dragonflies, swatting at grasshoppers;

蜻蜓 is the dragonfly. 𧈢蠟 (bā lǎ) is a dead regional word for some winged insect of the dragonfly, locust or grasshopper sort — one of a handful of local terms in this passage that have puzzled editors for four hundred years.

paying court to Old Heaven, bowing before the bodhisattvas;

參 is cān here, "to call upon, to pay respects" (as in 參拜), not shēn ("ginseng") or cēn. Monkeys solemnly saluting Heaven and bowing to the bodhisattvas (菩薩) is a joke — and also the first thing this troop does that a human would recognise as religion.

tugging at kudzu-vines, weaving little caps of grass;

葛 (gé) is kudzu and 籐 a variant of 藤 (téng), vine. 編草帓 (biān cǎo mò) is weaving a grass headband, 帓 being a cloth for the head; some editions print 編草帽 (mào), a hat.

catching lice, biting and pinching them;

虱子 are lice, and the monkeys deal with them by tooth and fingernail (掐 qiā, to pinch with the nails). The 維基文庫 text reads 咬又掐; some editions have 咬虼蚤, "biting fleas." We follow Wikisource.

grooming their furry coats, cleaning out their claws.

毛衣 here is a coat of fur, not a knitted jumper — the monkeys are grooming each other. 剔 (tī) is to pick or clean out; 指甲 are the nails.

some nestling close, some rubbing together;

From here to the end of the list the pattern is X的X — "some doing this, some doing that" — which turns a description into a jostling crowd. 挨 is āi, to press close and nestle, not ái; 擦 (cā) is to rub; the 的 is colloquial.

some shoving, some pressing down;

The same X的X pattern. 壓 (yā) is to press, to bear down on.

some pulling, some dragging:

The reduplications end on a colon, which hands us straight into the closing couplet. 扯 (chě) and 拉 (lā) are near-synonyms: pull, drag.

Beneath the green pine woods they romp as they please; by the green stream's edge they bathe at their leisure.

The set-piece closes on a balanced seven-and-seven couplet: 任他頑, let them play as they like, and 隨洗濯, bathe when they please (濯 zhuó, to wash). Freedom with not one rule in it. Hold on to the feeling — every discipline the novel later imposes gets measured against this afternoon.

When the troop of monkeys had played a while, they went off to bathe in the mountain stream.

一會 is "a little while," with 一 taking its yí tone before the falling tone of 會. 山澗 is a ravine-stream and 洗澡 is to bathe.

Seeing how that stream of ravine-water came rushing down, truly as if boiling and gushing and splashing over,

股 (gǔ) is the measure word for a stream or current of water. 滾瓜湧濺 is a vivid, almost improvised phrase for water boiling up and splashing over; 似 reads sì, "like."

As the old saying goes: 'Birds have the speech of birds, and beasts the speech of beasts.'

古云, "the ancients say," is the narrator producing a proverb to license what he is about to do — namely, let the monkeys hold a conversation. Birds have bird-speech (禽 qín), beasts have beast-speech (獸 shòu); the parallel is exact and the excuse is charming.

The monkeys all said: 'This stream of water — there's no telling where it comes from.

那裡 is interrogative here, "where," so 那 reads nǎ, not nà, "that" — the older written form of today's 哪. Everything that follows in this chapter starts from this idle remark. 都道 is "all said."

Today, with time on our hands and nothing to do, let's follow the stream up to its head and trace it to its source — let's go and have some fun!'

趕閑無事 is "at a loose end with nothing on" (閑 = 閒, idle). 溜頭 (liū tóu) is the head of the stream's run, 耍子 is colloquial "to play about," and 耶 (yē) is a lively little exclamation tacked on the end, like a spoken flourish. The plot of the next three passages is set going by boredom.

With a single shout, all of them — leading the young ones along, calling to brothers younger and elder — came running together,

拖男挈女 ("hauling the boys, leading the girls") and 呼弟呼兄 ("calling to brothers younger and older") are set four-character phrases for a whole community moving at once; 挈 (qiè) is to lead by the hand, and 一齊 is all together.

following the stream and climbing the slope, straight to the place of its source — and there it was, a cascading waterfall, a flying spring. And this is what they saw:

之處 again takes 處 as the noun chù, "place." 瀑布飛泉 pairs "waterfall" with "flying spring," and 但見那 — "and this is what they saw" — is the storyteller's standard cue for a descriptive poem.

A single sweep of white rainbow rises; a thousand fathoms of snow-white waves take flight.

Eight lines of five-character verse for one waterfall. 一派 is "a whole sheet of," and 尋 (xún) is an old measure of about eight 尺, so 千尋 simply means "unimaginably high." The white rainbow and the snow-waves are spray and foam.

The sea-wind blows, yet cannot break it off; the river-moon shines, and still it holds its place.

還依 is "still holds as it was." Wind cannot cut it off, moonlight cannot shift it — and "sea-wind" and "river-moon" quietly widen the frame, setting one waterfall inside a whole watery world. That prepares the monkeys' claim, a moment later, that this water runs all the way to the sea. (不 shifts to bú before the falling tone of 斷.)

Its cold breath divides the blue-green peaks; its overflow moistens the emerald haze.

嶂 (zhàng) is a steep, screen-like mountain; 翠微 is a fixed poetic term for the blue-green haze of distant hills (the Wikisource reading, against 翠薇 in some editions). 餘流 is the overflow and 潤 (rùn) is to moisten.

Babbling and pouring, it earns the name 'waterfall' — truly like a hanging curtain drawn across.

潺湲 is the sound and motion of running water, and 名 is used as a verb: it earns the name "waterfall." Then comes the image that matters — 掛簾帷, a hung-up curtain (掛 guà, the Wikisource reading, against the variant 挂). The poem has just named the 水簾洞, the Water-Curtain Cave, one passage before anybody finds it.