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

A parallel couplet of seven characters against seven — 果無好路朝西域，定有邪魔降大災 — sitting inside the prose with no 正是 to announce it and no block of verse after it. By the ruling of chapter 17 such untagged couplets stay prose: they are not flagged as verse and do not on their own put a passage onto 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 just spent a whole chapter's worth of hospitality on Squire Wang and disposes of the road between in three characters.

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 character 𩉢 is a rare form built on the leather radical 革, and the dictionaries give it an independent reading, jǐ, which yields no sense at all here. It is standing in for 鐙, the stirrup, and takes that word's reading, dèng — the same object the novel names openly in chapter 15, 寶鐙光飛金線明. 斜挑 is the action: the rider pushes himself up aslant in the stirrup to see over the edge. The character passes through the traditional-to-simplified conversion unchanged.

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

The rhapsody opens on three matched pairs joined by ；. Per the ruling of chapter 17, each half-line joined by that mark is kept as its own verse unit rather than being stitched back together — the same treatment given to a handful of sites in each of chapters 17, 18 and 19. This block yields thirteen units in all.

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

陟, zhì, "to climb," is doing adjective duty 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 。 rather than ；, and the rhapsody turns from listing attributes to painting a scene.

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

那山高不高 — the storyteller's rhetorical question, 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 fixes the mountain's vertical extent from 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 doubled sound-words in a row: 骨都都 of billowing cloud, 屹嶝嶝 of piled rock. By the ruling of chapter 16, purely imitative writings keep their default readings unless the default is not a real reading of the character at all, so 都 is dōu here and 嶝 is dèng. 說不盡 needs an override: a corpus-wide ruling raises 盡 to jìn, and because the tone of 不 depends on the tone of what follows, it must then be 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 is falling water. The mountain is being furnished with a cave a long time before any tenant is named for it — the demon of Yellow Wind does not so much as appear for another two thousand characters and more.

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 characters, four doubled sound-words and four beasts. 獐 is the river-deer; 泥泥痴痴, dull and stupid, describes an animal that stares at a man instead of running.

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 what is now Sichuan, proverbial for tigers. The tiger and the dragon of this line are the standing pair of Chan and inner-alchemy writing — and hold that thought, because the tiger is going to walk straight out of this poem and into the road three passages from here.

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 genuine 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, is the vernacular collective for wild beasts. 趷蹬蹬 is a heart knocking; 嚇得 takes the result-linking 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 noise: 當倒洞當當倒洞，洞當當倒洞當山. It is an echo — the mountain throwing a syllable back at itself — built out of three characters shuffled. The sound-word rule applies throughout: dāng dào dòng.

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

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