The Pilgrim took it, pressed down his cloud-head, went straight to the roof-ridge of the meditation hall, and covered over the Tang monk with the white horse and the baggage.

按著雲頭 — 著 is zhe. The shield goes over the meditation hall: the Tang monk, the dragon-horse, the luggage. Everything Wukong is responsible for, and nothing else.

Then he went and sat upon the roof of the abbot's quarters behind, where the old monk lodged, to guard the cassock.

And then he moves. He does not stay above his master; he goes to sit on the roof of the abbot's quarters, because that is where the cassock is. 坐著 takes zhe. Two roofs are guarded tonight, and neither of them is a monk's.

Watching the men set their fire, he turned, made the magic sign, recited the spell, faced the quarter of Xun, drew in a breath and blew it out;

捻訣念咒, to make the finger-sign and recite the spell. 巽 (xùn) is the trigram of Wind — ☴, the fifth of the eight — and to face the Xun quarter and exhale is to summon wind by the Yijing. The magic is done in Daoist grammar, on a Buddhist roof, against a Buddhist monastery.

and a wind rose, and blew that fire until it roared and raged. A fine fire! A fine fire! Behold:

吹得烘烘亂發: 得 is the neutral de, a complement of manner. 好火，好火！ — the storyteller's own delight, and it is delight; 但見 cues the fire-賦, the longest set-piece of the chapter.

Black smoke in billows, red flame in surges.

The 賦 opens on the two reduplicated binomes it will immediately take up in turn: 漠漠 (spreading, obscuring) for the smoke, 騰騰 (leaping, surging) for the flame.

Black smoke in billows — through the long sky not one star is seen;

長空 takes cháng. The smoke blots out the whole sky; there is no star to be seen anywhere above the monastery of the Bodhisattva.

red flame in surges — over the wide earth is light, a thousand lǐ of crimson.

And the answering line puts the light where the darkness was: not in heaven but on earth, and red. The 里 is left untranslated.

At the first, glittering golden serpents;

灼灼金蛇 — "glittering golden serpents," the first darting tongues of flame. 灼 is zhuó.

and after, blood-red horses in their fury.

威威血馬, "blood-horses in their might": the fire has grown from serpent to cavalry. Note that a horse is at this moment under the shield below.

The Three Breaths of the South display their prowess; Huilu, the Great Fire God, puts forth his power.

三炁 (sān qì) are the three primal breaths; the South is the quarter of fire in the Five Phases. 回祿 (Huílù) is the ancient god of fire, invoked by name.

Parched firewood burns out the nature of fierce fire — what talk is there now of Suiren drilling wood?

燥乾柴: 乾 is gān, dry. 燧人 is Suiren, the culture-hero who first drilled wood to make fire. The line dismisses him: what need of drilling, when the monks have stacked the tinder themselves?

Hot oil before the doors sends coloured flame flying — it outdoes the Patriarch's opened furnace.

老祖開爐 — the "old patriarch" is Laozi, whose Brazier of Eight Trigrams held Wukong for forty-nine days in chapter seven, and out of which he came with his fiery eyes. He knows this furnace from the inside.

This is a fire without feeling; how shall it be checked, when the cruelty is by design?

無情火 and 有意行兇 are the couplet's hinge, and the moral centre of the 賦: fire is without feeling, but the cruelty here is by design. The design, the reader knows, is now shared between the arsonists and the man on the roof.

It goes not to quell the calamity, but rather to abet the outrage.

弭災, to quell a disaster; 助虐, to abet a tyranny. The subject of both verbs is unnamed. It is the wind — and it is Wukong, who made the wind.

The wind follows the fire's force: flame flies a thousand zhàng and more;

丈 (zhàng) is left untranslated; it runs to some ten 尺. Wind and fire now feed each other in strict parallel, each line borrowing the other's force.

the fire vaunts the wind's might: ashes are flung to the ninth heaven.

九霄, the ninth heaven — where, a few minutes ago, the shield was borrowed. The ashes of the monastery are flung up to the gate Wukong came through.

Ping, ping, pang, pang — like firecrackers at the year's end;

Onomatopoeia in the ear and a festival in the mind: 殘年爆竹, the firecrackers of New Year's Eve. The 賦's comparisons grow steadily more human, and steadily more terrible.

po, po, la, la — like the roar of cannon in an army's midst.

潑潑喇喇 against 乒乒乓乓; and now the comparison is not a festival but artillery — 軍中炮聲, the sound of guns in an army.

It burns until the Buddha-images on their pedestals can find no escape, and the Sangharama of the eastern cloister has nowhere to hide.

燒得 takes the neutral de. 伽藍 (qiélán) transliterates Skt. saṃghārāma, the monastery itself and the deity who guards it. The images of the Buddha cannot get away; the guardian spirit of the cloister has nowhere to hide. It is the sharpest line in the 賦.

It surpasses the night battle in the fire of Red Cliff; it outdoes the flames within the Palace of Epang.

赤壁 is Red Cliff, where Zhou Yu burned Cao Cao's fleet in 208; 阿房宮 is the palace of the First Emperor, fired by Xiang Yu — read Ēpáng in the traditional pronunciation. The 賦 ends by measuring a monastery fire against the two most famous conflagrations in Chinese history, and finding it the greater.