Ah! On this going there could be no good road toward the Western Regions, and evil demons would surely send down a great calamity.

果無好路朝西域，定有邪魔降大災 is a parallel couplet of seven graphs to seven, standing inside the prose with no 正是 tag and no verse block after it. By the ruling of ch. 17 such untagged couplets remain prose: they are set as v:false and do not by themselves make a passage take the four-chip form. 朝 is the preposition cháo, "toward"; 降 is jiàng, "to send down," not xiáng, "to subdue."

The three of them had not been half a day on the way when sure enough they came upon a high mountain, and by the look of it exceedingly steep.

不上半日, less than half a day. The narrator has spent an entire chapter's worth of hospitality on Squire Wang and disposes of the intervening road in three graphs.

Sanzang's horse came to the cliff's edge; leaning aslant upon the precious stirrup he looked out, and truly there was this:

斜挑寶𩉢觀看. The graph 𩉢 (U+29262) is a rare 革-radical form; Unihan gives it the independent reading jǐ, which yields no sense here. It writes 鐙, the stirrup, and by the loan-graph rule takes that word's reading, dèng — the same object the novel names openly at ch. 15, 寶鐙光飛金線明. 斜挑: the rider rises aslant in the stirrup to see over the edge. Note that the graph passes through the traditional-to-simplified conversion unchanged.

High — that is the mountain; sheer — that is the ridge;

The 賦 opens with three matched pairs joined by ；. Per the ruling of ch. 17 each ；-joined half is kept as its own verse unit rather than being rejoined; five such sites occurred there, two in ch. 18, four in ch. 19, and thirteen units are produced from this block.

steep — that is the scarp; deep — that is the gully;

陟, zhì, "to climb," is used adjectivally in the same slot as 高 and 峻. 壑, hè, a gully.

sounding — that is the spring; fresh — that is the flower.

The third pair closes the opening figure on 。 instead of ；, and the rhapsody turns from attributes to scene.

That mountain, is it high? Its crown goes up to the blue empyrean.

那山高不高 — the rhetorical question of the storyteller, answered by his own next clause. 青霄, the blue empyrean.

This ravine, is it deep? In the bottom of it one sees the courts of the dead.

地府, the earth-prison of the dead. The pair of questions sets the vertical extent of the mountain from the sky to hell, which is the standard frame for these mountain rhapsodies.

Before the mountain are white clouds rolling and billowing, and strange rocks jagged and upstanding, and beyond all telling, a thousand zhàng and ten thousand, the Soul-Clutching Cliff.

Three reduplicated onomatopoeic binomes: 骨都都 of billowing cloud, 屹嶝嶝 of piled rock. By the ruling of ch. 16, purely onomatopoeic writings keep the pypinyin defaults unless the default is not a real reading of the graph; 都 is here dōu and 嶝 dèng. 說不盡 requires the sandhi override: 盡 is raised to jìn by GLOBAL_PY, so 不 must read bú.

Behind the cliff, winding and twisting, lies the Dragon-Hiding Cave; and within the cave, ting-a-ting and tang-a-tang, the Dripping-Water Crag.

藏龍洞 takes 藏 as cáng, "to hide." 叮叮噹噹 of falling water. The mountain is being furnished with a cave before any tenant is named for it; the demon of Yellow Wind will not appear for another thousand graphs.

And there one sees branching and forking the antlered deer; muddled and mazy the man-watching river-deer; coiling and curling the red-scaled python; frolicking and romping the white-faced ape.

The longest unit of the rhapsody, thirty-one graphs, four reduplicated binomes and four beasts. 獐 is the river-deer; 泥泥痴痴, dull and stupid, of an animal that stares at a man instead of fleeing.

At dusk, the tiger of Ba's hills that hunts out its lair; at dawn, the dragon that churns the wave and rises from the water; and, as they climb, the cave-mouth sounds hu-la-la.

巴山, the hills of Ba in Sichuan, proverbial for tigers. The tiger and the dragon of this line are the standing pair of Chan and internal-alchemy discourse, and the tiger of this line will step out of the poem and into the road in six passages' time.

In the grass the flying birds go up pu-lu-lu; in the wood the running beasts pace off jü-lie-lie.

撲轤轤 of birds flushed from cover, 掬哷哷 of beasts pacing. 哷, liè, is glossed in the Jiyun as rhyming with 劣, so the default is a true reading and stands.

Of a sudden a pack of wolves goes past, and a man's heart is startled ke-teng-teng with fright.

狼蟲, wolves and creeping things, the vernacular collective for wild beasts. 趷蹬蹬 of a heart knocking; 嚇得 takes the resultative de.

It is truly a dang-dao-dong, a dang-dang-dao-dong, a dong-dang-dang-dao-dong-dang of a mountain.

The most extraordinary line in the rhapsody, and untranslatable except as sound: 當倒洞當當倒洞，洞當當倒洞當山. It is an echo — the mountain repeating a syllable back at itself — built from three graphs permuted. The onomatopoeia rule applies: dāng dào dòng throughout.

Green mineral pigment has dyed a thousand zhàng of jade; a blue gauze curtains ten thousand banks of mist.

The rhapsody closes on two lines of settled couplet-verse after all that noise. 青岱 is the blue-green mineral pigment used for painting eyebrows and mountains alike. 籠罩 takes 籠 as lǒng, "to cover over."