The Pilgrim then worked his magic: he shook himself, changed, and became the very likeness of the girl, and sat alone in the room to wait for the monster.

搖身一變, a shake of the body and a change, is the standard formula for shape-shifting throughout the novel — and still the phrase Chinese reaches for when somebody performs a sudden about-face. 變得 takes 得 as the unstressed de. 獨自個 is quite alone, with 個 tacked on for emphasis.

Before long a wind came up, and truly the stones walked and the sand flew. A fine wind it was:

走石飛砂 repeats, word for word, the phrase Squire Gao used of his son-in-law's winds; the reader is meant to recognise it before the creature appears. 好風, a fine wind, opens the rhapsody the way 但見那 opened the lyric in the back court.

At its first coming it was faint and swaying; afterwards it grew vast and boundless.

A 賦, a rhapsody, in ten paired units. The two doubled phrases — 微微蕩蕩 and 渺渺茫茫 — are laid out here and then picked up again at the head of the next unit, carried forward like the refrain of a song.

Faint and swaying, it filled heaven and earth; vast and boundless, it met with no let nor hindrance.

乾坤 keeps 乾 as qián — the trigram, one of the eight three-line figures of the Book of Changes — and paired with 坤 it means heaven and earth taken together, the whole world. This is the same character that was gān, dry, in the firewood of the opening passage. 阻礙 is obstruction.

It stripped the blossom and snapped the willow better than hemp is stuffed; it toppled trees and broke the forest as one pulls up a cabbage.

揌, sāi, writes 塞, to stuff, so 勝揌麻 means easier than packing hemp into a sack. 倒樹 takes 倒 as dǎo, to fell; the default gives dào, to pour.

It overturned rivers and stirred the seas, and ghosts and spirits grieved; it split rock and levelled mountains, and heaven and earth were astonished.

The couplet is stock from end to end — 翻江攪海, 裂石崩山 — and the stockness is the point. This is the wind of every fiend in the book, issued out of the storehouse.

The flower-cropping elk lost the trail he came by; the fruit-plucking ape was bewildered outside his own wood.

啣花 is carrying a blossom in the mouth; 糜鹿 is writing 麋鹿, the elk. The creatures of this couplet are the creatures of the peaceable spring landscape at the start of the chapter, and here they are lost and bewildered.

The seven-storey iron pagoda was struck at the Buddha-head; the eight-sided banners were torn from the precious canopy.

The rhapsody now turns to the furniture of a Buddhist hall: the 七層鐵塔, a seven-storey iron pagoda; the 幢幡, chuáng fān, the hanging banners; the 寶蓋, the precious canopy over an image. 佛 is read fó throughout this site.

Beams of gold and pillars of jade rocked from their footings; tiles flew from the roofs like clods of swallow-clay.

起根搖 is rocked right up from the roots. 燕塊 is the clay of a swallow's nest, hence a light clod — the sort of thing that comes off a roof. The image is domestic where the one before it was sacred.

The boatman lifted his oar and vowed a vow; casting off, he made haste to promise pig and sheep in payment.

舉棹 is to lift the oar, with 棹 read zhào; 梢公 is the boatman. 許願心 is to make a vow and 豬羊賽 to promise a pig and a sheep in payment of it. And there, three lines before he walks in, sits 豬 — the monster's own surname, in the middle of a formula about sacrificing pigs.

The earth-god of the ward forsook his shrine; the dragon-kings of the four seas bowed themselves toward the court above.

當坊土地 is the earth-god of this particular ward, the local deity of a few streets and the smallest god in the pantheon; 當 is dāng, of this place. 朝上拜: 朝 is cháo, to face the court above. One couplet sends the smallest god running and the dragon-kings bowing.

By the sea it stove in a yaksha's boat; at the Great Wall it blew down half a frontier fort.

夜叉, yè chā, is the yaksha, a sea-demon of the dragon-king's retinue. 長城 takes 長 as cháng, the Long Wall. 刮倒 takes 倒 as dǎo, blown down. And 塞 here is sài, a frontier fort — which is the same character 揌 was borrowed for earlier in this same wind-poem, except that there it carried its other reading, sāi, to stuff. One wind, one character, both of its lives.