The Great Sage reached Yingzhou, and there beneath the cinnabar cliffs and pearl-trees he saw several white-haired, hoary-bearded figures — immortals with children's faces and cranelike temples — playing go, drinking wine, and laughing over their songs.

Nine old men under the cliffs, playing go and drinking and singing -- a picture of leisure so complete it is almost a rebuke to the man arriving with a deadline. 丹崖珠樹 is cinnabar cliffs and pearl-trees. 皓髮皤髯, white hair and hoary beard, and 童顏鶴鬢, a child's face with crane-white temples, are the set descriptions of the immortal who is ancient and young at once. 著棋 is to play go, 著 = zhuó, to place a stone.

Truly it was a scene like this:

真個是, truly it was, is the reciter's cue into a set-piece.

Auspicious clouds brimming with light, propitious haze afloat with fragrance.

What follows is not a poem in the usual sense but a rhapsody (賦) -- a long, unrhymed showpiece built out of matched pairs of lines, freer in shape than the eight-line poems used for Penglai and Fangzhang and considerably more ornate. It opens with two four-character phrases: 祥雲, auspicious cloud, and 瑞靄, propitious mist, the standard weather of an immortal realm.

Bright luan-birds cry at the cavern mouth; dark cranes dance upon the mountain crest.

彩鸞, the many-hued luán, and 玄鶴, the dark crane, are the immortals' companion birds, posted here at cave-mouth and mountain-top to frame the scene.

Green lotus-root and water-peaches serve as their wine-relish; interlacing pears and fiery jujubes grant a thousand autumns of life.

按酒 is food eaten with wine -- the immortal equivalent of bar snacks, except that the snacks are green lotus-root and water-peaches. In 為按酒, to serve as wine-relish, 為 takes its purposive reading wèi (the 廣韻 spells it 于偽切), meaning to serve for, rather than the copula wéi. 交梨火棗, crossed pears and fire-jujubes, are legendary Daoist fruits of immortality.

Not one of them has heard a summons in cinnabar; yet each is enrolled by immortal talisman.

丹詔 is a vermilion decree, the summons that arrives from a court and cannot be refused. These elders have never had one -- and yet 仙符有籍, they stand registered by immortal talisman. They answer to no earthly office but are on the celestial roll all the same.

At ease, they drift as the waves may carry them; free and unbound, they yield to the pure and secluded.

逍遙, carefree wandering, is the great ideal of the 莊子, whose opening chapter takes its title from the word. 散淡 is loose and placid, untrammelled, 散 read sǎn. These two lines are the theme of the whole rhapsody.

The circling sixty-year cycles can lay no hold on them; in all the earth, in heaven and earth, they are only free.

周天甲子 is the sixty-year cycle circling the heavens, 子 the cyclical zǐ -- time itself, in its Chinese accounting. 乾坤 is heaven and earth, 乾 = qián. Neither time nor space can lay a hand on them, which is precisely what Wukong cannot say of himself just now.

Dark gibbons offering fruit attend them, pair by pair, in fond devotion;

玄猿 are dark gibbons; 參隨 is to attend in train, 參 = cān, to wait upon. Even the animals of the isle serve willingly -- and there is a quiet joke in it, since the ape arriving at the gate is nobody's attendant.

White deer with flowers in their mouths bow down before them, two by two, in close and tender fellowship.

啣花白鹿 are white deer with flowers held in their mouths, 啣 a way of writing 銜. 綢繆 is closely bound, tender, intimate, with 甚 = shèn, very. A paradise so much at peace that the deer bow.