Its form all hollows and swellings; its slopes yet more jagged and steep.

凸凹, tū āo, is bumps and hollows — two characters that are pictures of what they mean, one sticking out and one caved in. 崎嶇 is rough going. 更 is gèng, "still more."

Sheer as the ranges of Shu; lofty as the cliffs of Lu.

Two byword mountains. 蜀嶺 are the ranges of Shu, modern Sichuan, proverbially unclimbable — the country of the line "the road to Shu is harder than the road to heaven." 廬巖 are the crags of Mount Lu. 似 is sì.

No famed mountain of the world of light, but truly a place of peril in the shadow-realm.

The couplet nails the scene down: whatever it resembles, this is not a mountain in the world of the living.

In thickets of bramble lurk ghosts and monsters; on glittering rock-faces hide demons and fiends.

磷磷, lín lín, is the glitter of wet or crystalline stone. 藏 here is cáng, to hide — not zàng, a repository, which is the same character used differently a few passages back.

At the ear no cry of beast or bird is heard; before the eye are only ghosts and goblins moving.

No birds, no animals. The absence is the point: nothing that breathes lives here, and the only movement is ghosts. 行 is xíng, to move about.

A shadow-wind, soughing and sighing; a black mist, spreading and vast.

颯颯 is the sound of wind in dry things; 漫漫 is boundless spread. Both are doubled words that work by sound as much as sense, like "rustle" and "sprawl" said twice.

The soughing shadow-wind is the smoke whistled forth from the mouths of spirit-soldiers;

And now the conceit that makes the passage: that wind is not weather. It is breath, whistled out of the mouths of spirit-soldiers.

the spreading black mist is the breath spewed out in the dark by lurking fiends.

Nor is the mist mist. 鬼祟 are skulking demons — the word survives in modern Chinese as 鬼鬼祟祟, "furtive, up to no good." 暗中 uses 中 as zhōng, "in the dark." The whole landscape is being exhaled by its inhabitants.

As far as one looks, high and low, there is no fair prospect; glancing left and right, all is wild desolation.

猖亡 is wild desolation, a variant of 淒涼. 盡 is jìn, "utterly"; 相 is xiāng.

There are mountains there, and peaks, and ridges, and caverns, and ravines;

那裡 here is the pointing nà lǐ, "there" — not the question word nǎ lǐ, "where," which is the same pair of characters. Mountains, peaks, ridges, caverns, ravines: the list is deliberately flat and complete, and it is a set-up. The next line takes every item back.

only the mountains grow no grass, the peaks pierce no sky, the ridges bear no traveler, the caverns hold no cloud, the ravines run no water.

And there is the joke, if a poem this grim can have one: each feature is named only to be stripped of the thing that makes it what it is. Mountains that grow nothing, peaks that reach nothing, ridges nobody walks, caves holding no cloud, ravines with no water. A landscape defined entirely by what has been subtracted. 行 is xíng, to travel.

Before the banks, all is goblins; below the ridges, all is demon-spirits; within the caverns wild ghosts are gathered; at the bottom of the ravines lurk evil souls.

魍魎, wǎng liǎng, are the sprites of hill and stream — two characters that exist almost solely to sit beside each other. 盡 is jìn; 中 is zhōng.

Before the mountain and behind, Ox-Head and Horse-Face raise a wild clamor;

Ox-Head and Horse-Face again, and note the difference: at the palace gate they stood in ranks, here they are simply making a racket all over the hillside.

half-hidden, half-revealed, hungry ghosts and destitute souls weep now and again to one another.

藏 here is cáng, concealed. 餓鬼 are the hungry ghosts, the Sanskrit preta — beings with vast bellies and pinhole throats, condemned to a permanent hunger they cannot relieve. They will matter later in the chapter, when the emperor has to buy his way past a crowd of them.

The life-hastening magistrates, in frantic haste, pass on their summons-warrants;

信票 is a warrant-slip authorising the collection of a soul. Death, in this world, requires paperwork in triplicate.

the soul-pursuing marshals, shouting and bawling, hurry along their official dispatches.

趲, zǎn, is to hurry something along. 公文 is official documentation — the same word a Ming clerk would have used for the files on his own desk. Hell runs on despatches.

Quick-foot runners, in whirlwinds rolling and rolling;

急腳子 are "quick-foot" couriers, the express messengers of the underworld post; 子 here is the light zi, the ending Chinese tacks onto a noun the way English tacks "-er" onto a verb.

arrest-office men, in black mist thick and thronging.

勾司人 are the men of the summoning office, who fetch the dead in. The rhapsody ends not on torment but on traffic: an administration at full stretch, every desk busy.