Presently, having no plan, they carried all the food they had made ready up into the tower, made sacrifice, and burnt paper.

無計 — no plan, nothing to be done. The village cannot fetch the saints back, so it does the only thing it knows how to do with an absence: it treats it as a presence and makes an offering to it. 燒紙, burning paper money, is what Chinese households do for the dead. The pilgrims are alive, upstairs is empty, and the village has just started their funeral rites. The character for carrying it up, 擡, is one the simplified script abolished seventy years ago in favour of another with the same sound and sense. This edition prints the old form; the simplified view shows the standard one.

From then on there were four great sacrifices a year, and twenty-four lesser ones.

Twenty-eight observances a year, and the novel gives the number the way a parish register would. Four for the seasons, twenty-four for the fortnightly divisions of the Chinese farming calendar — a full liturgical year, invented on the spot for four men who left in the night. It is one sentence, and it turns a disappointment into an institution.

And there were those praying over sickness, those praying for safety, those seeking a match or making a vow, those asking wealth and asking sons — no hour and no day but somebody came to burn incense and make offering.

Read the list. Sickness, safety, a marriage, a vow, money, a son. Not one person is asking for enlightenment. Within a paragraph of the pilgrims' departure the village has them doing exactly the job the river spirit used to do, and asking for exactly the same things. 祭賽 is the word that gives it away. It occurs twenty-eight times in the novel and twenty-two of them are in the chapter where these same villagers handed over a boy and a girl every year to the Great King of the river. They have kept the word and changed only what it points at. The last of the six petitions is 求子, asking for a son. Its second character is read zǐ here — the full word for a child, not the light ending it becomes in ordinary compounds. Children are what this village once paid the river in.

Truly it was: in the golden censer a fire unbroken a thousand years; in the jade cup a lamp burning bright ten thousand.

A perfectly balanced pair of lines — golden censer against jade cup, a thousand years against ten thousand — introduced by 真個是, the storyteller's cue for a set piece. And the printer did not indent it. Everywhere else in the novel a line like this is set apart on the page as verse; here it runs on inside the paragraph, so this edition prints it as prose and this edition is what we follow. 萬載 — ten thousand years. Its second character is read zǎi, a year, not zài, to carry. Two characters, one shape, and only the sense tells them apart.

But of that, no more.

Two characters, and the thread is dropped. The village will not appear again. 不題 is the twin of the 且不言 that opened the chapter — one sets a thread aside before starting, the other after finishing. The whole Chen village episode sits between them, shut at both ends, which is the storyteller showing you that this was a digression and he knows it.