But we tell now how the Great Sage Sun, reaching the upper air, gave his waist a single twist and came at once above Black Wind Mountain.

卻說 is the narrator swinging the camera round to somebody else — the standard hinge of a storyteller's chapter. Two small readings: the 兒 of 腰兒 is a diminutive, a little tag hung on a word to make it small and familiar, and it goes toneless, er, rather than taking its full ér. And 扭了一扭, the verb repeated around 一, makes the movement offhand and over in a second; because 扭 is third tone, the 一 in front of it comes out yì.

He halted his cloud-head and looked carefully. It was indeed a fine mountain, and the season was full spring. Behold:

雲頭, the cloud-head, is the little disc of vapour a flier stands on, so halting it means stopping dead in mid-air. Then 但見 — behold — the storyteller's signal that a set-piece description is coming. What follows is a 賦 or rhapsody: a long, unrhymed showpiece built out of matched pairs of lines, and it is laid out here as verse.

Ten thousand ravines contend in their torrents; a thousand cliffs vie in their beauty.

爭 and 競, contend and vie, are the whole rhapsody in miniature: this landscape is not sitting still, it is competing with itself. The opening pair of four-character phrases sets the beat that the rest of the piece will play against.

Birds call, and no man is seen; blossoms drop, and the trees are fragrant still.

The couplet — the matched pair of lines — is built on an absence. 人不見, no man is seen, and the scent still rising from a blossom already fallen are the two proofs that nobody comes here. The 不 before the fourth-tone 見 lifts to bú.

Rain passes: the sky joins a green wall of stone, glistening. Wind comes: the pines furl, and a kingfisher screen unfolds.

青壁 is the rock face darkened by rain. In the second half the pines 松捲 roll up like a furled banner, and the 翠屏, kingfisher screen, is both the ridge itself and the painted folding screen a ridge that colour looks like.

Mountain grasses put forth, wild flowers open, on hanging cliff and beetling crag;

The metre changes gear here — three, three, then four. 峭嶂 is a cliff standing as sheer and flat as a screen set on end.

fig-vine and creeper spring, fine trees grow lovely, on the steep ridge and the level hill.

薜蘿, fig-vine and creeper, is what the recluse wears in the Chuci, so its appearance quietly promises a hermit that the very next couplet will refuse to supply. One reading matters here: 崗 must be gāng. It writes 岡, a ridge, and it is carrying the -ang rhyme that ties together 香, 張, 狂 and 光. Reading it as modern gǎng would break the poem open.

No recluse is met with here — where would one look for a woodcutter?

那 is doing question duty here — nǎ, where — not pointing at something as nà. This is the hinge of the whole rhapsody: a place so far out that neither hermit nor woodcutter has ever reached it, and therefore exactly right for whatever has.

By the torrent a pair of cranes are drinking; on the rocks the wild gibbons run mad.

狂 is not madness but the absence of restraint: nobody is watching these apes. The line finishes the argument the previous couplet started.

Massed and heaped like coiled shells, they range their indigo; towering, gathering their green, they toy with the light of the mountain haze.

This is painters' language. 堆螺 sees the peaks heaped like the whorls of conch shells, and 黛 is the indigo of the eyebrow-pencil they seem to have been washed in. 嵐光 is light caught inside mountain vapour.