When the Pilgrim heard the words "Buddha-robe," he settled it in his mind that the treasure was his own.

聞得 is again the resultative de. 以為 takes the copular wéi. The verb 定 — he settled it, fixed it — is the narrator's quiet mark against him: the Pilgrim does not infer, he decides.

He could not master his rage. Springing out from the stone cliff, he raised the golden-hooped rod in both hands and shouted, "You pack of thieving fiends!

忍不住: the sandhi of 不 before the fourth-tone 住 gives bú. 夥 is a pack or gang, a classifier fit for bandits.

You have stolen my cassock, and now you would hold a Buddha-Robe Feast?

甚麼 reads shén. He throws their own coinage back at them: he has been listening long enough to have learnt the name of the party.

Bring it here this instant and give it back!" With a bellow of "Not a step!" he swung up the rod and brought it down full on their heads.

趁早兒 carries the diminutive 兒, toneless er. 將來 here is the full verb 將, jiāng, "bring," and 還 is huán, to give back, not the adverbial hái. 休走 is the standard shout before a blow.

In their panic the black fellow turned to wind and fled, the Taoist mounted a cloud and was gone, and only the white-clad scholar was beaten dead by a single stroke.

慌得 takes the resultative de. The three escapes are graded: the bear becomes wind, the Taoist rides a cloud, and the scholar does neither. What cannot fly is what is killed.

Dragging the body over to look at it, he found it was a mottled white snake-spirit.

拖將過來: 將 is the verbal particle, jiāng, marking the direction of the action. 白花蛇 is a mottled white snake — the white robe and the white scales are one and the same disclosure, made after the fact.

He hauled it up for good measure and wrenched it into five or seven lengths; then he went straight into the deep mountain to hunt for that black fellow.

捽, zuó, is to seize and wrench. 五七斷 is not a count but the idiom for "into pieces." The gratuitousness is the point: the snake was already dead.

Rounding a sharp peak and skirting a steep ridge, he saw, before a sheer wall of cliff, a cave-dwelling reared aloft. Behold it:

抹 here is to skirt or brush past. 但見那 announces the second rhapsody of the chapter, and the reader is by now able to predict that the cave will be described as a paradise.

Mist and rosy cloud, faint and far; pine and cypress, dense and dark.

The rhapsody opens with two four-graph phrases and then repeats them at greater length, a favourite figure of expansion in the 賦.

Mist and rosy cloud, faint and far, their colours crowding the gate; pine and cypress, dense and dark, their green encircling the door.

遶 writes 繞 and reads rào by the loan-graph rule. 采 is the colour that mist takes on at the gate.

The bridge is trodden on a withered raft of timber; the summit is wound about with fig-vine.

枯槎 is a dead tree used as a bridge, and also the raft on which a man of legend once floated to the Milky Way; the graph carries the second sense faintly.

Birds bear red stamens to the cloudy ravine; deer tread the fragrant thicket to the terrace of stone.

啣, xián, is to hold in the beak. Birds carrying blossom and deer treading the terrace are the standard furniture of the paradise-cave, and the reader should be uneasy at how well the fiend has furnished his.

Before that gate the season hurries the flowers to open, and the wind conveys their scent.

那 is the demonstrative nà. 時催: the season itself urges the flowers, as an officer urges a labourer.

Overlooking the dyke, green willows turn with orioles; bordering the bank, young peach trees flutter with powdered butterflies.

傍岸 — here 傍 is the verb, to border or lie beside, and keeps bàng; contrast 傍門外道 above, where the same graph writes 旁 and reads páng. 夭桃, the young peach, comes from the Shijing.

A wilderness, and scarcely to be boasted of — yet it outdoes the prospect below Penglai.

The turn is a courteous slight: 曠野不堪誇 concedes the place a wilderness, and the next clause takes the concession back. 蓬萊 is the isle of the immortals. A bear-fiend keeps a garden the immortals might envy.