Now the Pilgrim served the Tang monk on their westward way, and after several days of travel it was the very dead of the twelfth month's cold: a north wind blew keen and biting, and the frozen ground lay glassy and slick.

The chapter opens the way a serial does, mid-stride. 卻說 què shuō — roughly "now to return to" — is how a storyteller picks a thread back up, and the novel reaches for it every time it changes scene. What it picks up here is winter. 臘月 là yuè is the twelfth lunar month, the coldest stretch of the year, and 朔風 shuò fēng is the wind out of the north, 朔 meaning north. The last two pairs work by sound rather than sense: 凜凜 (biting) and 凌凌 (glazed with ice) each double a syllable, so the sentence ends on a shiver you hear before you parse it.

The road they walked ran by sheer cliffs and jagged bluffs, a rugged and broken track, over steep peaks and range upon range of piled-up ridges.

For one sentence the prose falls into verse and then climbs out again. 懸崖峭壁 ("hanging cliffs, sheer walls") is answered, phrase for phrase, by 疊嶺層巒 ("layered ridges, tiered summits") — two blocks of four characters with matching shapes, the standard way of signalling hard country ahead. 崎嶇 qí qū is rough and uneven, 險峻 xiǎn jùn steep and dangerous. 崎嶇 is still the word a Chinese speaker reaches for today, both for a bad road and for a hard life.

Sanzang, up on his horse, caught from far off the rushing gurgle of water grating at his ear, and turned his head to call: "Wukong, where is that water sounding?"

The road is fine and the day is fine, and then Sanzang hears water. 唿喇喇 hū lā lā is pure noise-painting for a torrent — the characters are picked for their sound, not their meaning — and 聒耳 guō ěr is to din in the ear, with 聒 read guō. 悟空, the name he calls, is the Pilgrim's monastic name: "awakened to emptiness". Watch 那裡 here — it is a question, "where?", so 那 is nǎ and not the pointing nà of "over there". Those same two characters swing between the two senses right through the chapter, sometimes twice in one line.

Said the Pilgrim: "I recall this place is called Coiled-Snake Mountain, and the gorge here Eagle-Grief Ravine; it must be the water sounding down in the gorge."

Wukong has been this way before, and names the place: 蛇盤山 Shépán Shān, "Coiled-Snake Mountain", and 鷹愁澗 Yīngchóu Jiàn, "Eagle-Grief Gorge". A 澗 jiàn is a mountain stream, or the ravine that holds one. The usual account of the gorge's name is that it runs so deep and so sheer that even a hawk crossing it loses its nerve. Hold that thought: the chapter supplies a different reason later, and a nastier one. In 記得 the 得 is unstressed, de, doing nothing but tie the verb to its outcome — not "get" but "manage to recall".

Before he had finished speaking the horse reached the water's edge, and Sanzang drew up his rein to look. And this was the sight:

勒韁 lè jiāng is to draw up the rein. 勒 has two readings and the one wanted is lè, checking a mount — not lēi, which is hauling a rope tight around something. Remember the gesture; Sanzang makes it again in the chapter's last passage, on a very different horse. 但見, "and this was all one saw", is the storyteller's curtain-raiser: where it appears, verse follows.

A trickling cold vein of water winds its way out through the clouds; its deep, clear ripples take up the sun and give back red.

The set-piece opens small. 涓涓 juān juān is the trickle and murmur of a thin stream, and 寒脈 makes the water a "cold vein" running through the rock. 湛湛 zhàn zhàn is deep and clear at the same time. Both are doubled syllables and both are about delicacy — the poem starts with this water at its gentlest, which is worth holding on to.

Its sound stirs like night rain, heard through a hidden valley; its brightness breaks like dawn cloud, dazzling the empty sky.

The couplet now splits the senses between its halves: the first line is what the water sounds like, the second what it looks like. Heard, it is 夜雨 (night rain) in a 幽谷 (a shut-in valley). Seen, it is 朝霞, the red of dawn cloud, where 朝 is read zhāo, "morning", not cháo, "court". 眩 xuàn is to dazzle — the same character that gives modern Chinese its word for feeling giddy.

From dizzying heights the waves fly up and spit out shattered jade; a single pool resounds, and roars in the clear wind.

仞 rèn is an old measure of height, about eight 尺 chǐ; but "a thousand 仞" is not arithmetic, it is simply how Chinese says dizzyingly high. 噴碎玉, "spitting out shattered jade", is the stock image for white water, and still the compliment a Chinese guidebook pays a waterfall. 一泓 yì hóng uses the measure word kept for a body of clear water: a pool takes 泓 the way a book takes 本.

It flows off to lose itself in a boundless reach of misted waves, where gulls and egrets forget each other and no angler ever comes.

頃 is a land measure, so 萬頃 wàn qǐng ("ten thousand 頃") sizes the water by the acre and means, in effect, past measuring. The closing line is a quotation in all but name. 鷗鷺相忘 — "gulls and egrets forget one another" — points at the story in 《列子》 of a man the seagulls used to settle on freely, until the morning he went down to the shore meaning to catch one, and not a bird would come near him. They could smell the scheme. 相 is xiāng, "each other", so the forgetting runs both ways. The poem thus ends on a mind with nothing in it worth being wary of — and the novel is about to blow that up.