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 at all.

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 and sits 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 is to make the finger-sign and recite the spell. 巽 (xùn) is Wind, ☴ — a trigram, one of the eight three-line figures of the Yijing, the Book of Changes, each of which stands for an element of the world and for a compass direction. So to face the Xun quarter and breathe out is to summon wind by the book. 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, tying the verb to the manner of it. 好火，好火！ — "A fine fire! A fine fire!" — is the storyteller's own delight, and it is genuinely delight. 但見 then cues the fire-rhapsody, the longest set-piece in the chapter.

Black smoke in billows, red flame in surges.

The description opens on the two doubled pairs it will immediately take up one at a time: 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 — and so there is not a 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 the earth, and red instead of white. The 里 is left untranslated.

At the first, glittering golden serpents;

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

and after, blood-red horses in their fury.

威威血馬 is "blood-horses in their might": the fire has grown from serpent to cavalry in the space of two lines. Note that there is a horse 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, and the South is the quarter of fire in the scheme of Five Phases — so a southern fire is fire behaving as it ought. 回祿 (Huí lù) is the ancient god of fire, invoked here 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 Chinese Prometheus. The line waves him away: what need is there 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 the Eight Trigrams held Wukong for forty-nine days in chapter seven, and out of which he came with the fire-tempered eyes he still has. He knows this particular 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 whole description: fire is without feeling, but the cruelty here is by design. And the design, as the reader knows and the poem does not say, 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 is to quell a disaster; 助虐 is to abet a tyranny. The subject of both verbs goes 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, so a thousand of them is a flame taller than any building in the empire. Wind and fire now feed one another 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 is the ninth heaven — which is where, a few minutes ago, the shield was borrowed. The ashes of the monastery are being flung up to the very gate Wukong came through.

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

Noise in the ear and a festival in the mind: 殘年爆竹 is the firecrackers of New Year's Eve. The comparisons in this description 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 set 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. One line, and New Year has become a battlefield.

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 a neutral de. 伽藍 (qié lán) transliterates Sanskrit saṃghārāma and means both the monastery itself and the deity who guards it. So: the images of the Buddha cannot get away, and the guardian spirit of the cloister has nowhere to hide. It is the sharpest line in the whole description.

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 Ē páng in the traditional pronunciation. The description ends by measuring a provincial monastery fire against the two most famous conflagrations in Chinese history, and finding it the greater of the three.