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 turning the camera. 腰兒 takes the diminutive 兒, toneless er, not the lexical ér that pypinyin supplies by default. 扭了一扭 — the verb doubled about 一 — makes the motion casual and momentary; the sandhi of 一 follows the third tone of 扭 and gives 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 disc of vapour a flier stands on; to halt it is to alight in mid-air. 但見 is the storyteller formula that opens a set-piece description; what follows is a 賦, a rhapsody in parallel prose, and is set here as verse.

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

爭 and 競 are the rhapsody in miniature: the landscape is not still but in contention with itself. The four-graph opening pair sets the metre the piece will vary from.

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

The couplet turns on absence. 人不見 and the fragrance of a fallen blossom are the two proofs of a place unvisited; the sandhi of 不 before the fourth-tone 見 gives 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 rain-darkened rock face. 松捲: the pines roll like a furled banner, and 翠屏, the kingfisher screen, is at once the ridge and the painted screen it resembles.

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

The metre shifts to three-three-four. 峭嶂 is a cliff standing sheer as a folding screen.

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

薜蘿, the fig-vine and the dodder, is the recluse's clothing in the Chu ci, and its presence here half-promises the hermit the next couplet denies. 崗 must read gāng: it writes 岡, a ridge, and carries the rhyme in -ang that binds 香 · 張 · 狂 · 光. The modern gǎng would break the poem.

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

那 here is interrogative nǎ, "where," not the demonstrative nà. The couplet is the hinge of the rhapsody: a landscape so remote that neither hermit nor woodcutter has found it — and therefore fit for what has found it.

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

狂 is not madness but unrestraint; the apes have no man to watch them. The line completes the argument of the preceding one.

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

堆螺 — the peaks heaped like the coiled shells of the conch — is a painter's figure, and 黛 the indigo of the eyebrow-pencil with which they are washed in. 嵐光 is the light held in the mountain vapour.