日暮投宿 Nightfall on the Road
同師前進，不覺的紅日沉西，天光漸晚。但見：同师前进，不觉的红日沉西，天光渐晚。但见：
逐句解 Line by line
They went forward together, master and disciple, and before they were aware the red sun had sunk in the west and the light of the sky grew late. And this was the sight:
不覺的, "before they were aware." 但見 is the formula that ushers in a descriptive rhapsody; the chapter has used it twice before, for the gorge and for the duel, and uses it now for nightfall.
Thin clouds in tangled disarray; the mountain moon dim and blurred.
撩亂, "tangled, in disorder"; 昏蒙, "dusky and clouded." The rhapsody opens in paired four-character units, the standard opening measure of the form.
Frost-colour fills the whole sky and breeds cold; the sound of wind on four sides pierces the body.
霜色, "the hue of frost"; 透體, "to pierce clean through the body." Sight is converted into sensation: the sky's colour is felt as cold, the wind's sound as a wound.
Where the lone bird goes, the grey islet stretches wide; where the sinking rose-cloud brightens, the far hills lie low.
渚 (zhǔ) is a small islet in a stream; 落霞, "the falling roseate cloud" of sunset. The couplet lengthens to seven syllables, opening the scene out just as the light does.
In the thin wood a thousand trees roar; on the empty ridge one gibbon cries.
疏林, "sparse woodland"; the lone gibbon's cry is the oldest signal of desolation in Chinese verse, older than the novel by a thousand years. The line contracts to five syllables — the landscape tightening as night comes down.
On the long road no traveller's track is seen; ten thousand lǐ off, a homeward boat puts in at nightfall.
長途 takes 長 as cháng, "long"; 行人, the traveller (行 read xíng). The rhapsody ends on the one image of arrival it contains — a boat coming home at nightfall — and that boat belongs to somebody else. The pilgrims have no home to reach, only a road.
This little rhapsody is a study in metrical contraction and release: four-character units for the clouded moon, six for the frost and wind, seven for the widening islet and the far hills, five for the roaring wood and the gibbon, seven again to close. The scene tightens and opens with the failing light, and the movement is entirely deliberate — the form performing what the words describe.
Its last line is the sting. Every image before it is of emptiness: a lone bird departing, a solitary gibbon, a long road with no track upon it. Then, at ten thousand 里' distance, a boat comes home. The pilgrims have just been ferried across a gorge by a boatman who vanished into midstream, and they are about to beg a night's lodging from strangers. The homeward boat is the one thing in the landscape that has somewhere to arrive, and it is not theirs.