Master and disciples took their leave and set upon the road, and soon a high mountain rose into view.

One sentence, and the scenery changes. 早 (zǎo) is "already, soon" — barely on the road before the next obstacle is in sight. Regular readers learn to brace at this line: a mountain rising ahead is how nearly every 難 (nàn), every ordeal on the pilgrimage's tally, begins.

Said Tripitaka, "Disciples, the mountain ahead is steep and perilous — I fear the horse cannot pass. All of you must take the greatest care."

Tripitaka's first words on this mountain are a warning to be careful, which is exactly the wrong lesson to take from what follows. 險峻 (xiǎn jùn) is "sheer, precipitous". The doubling in 仔細仔細 (zǐ xì zǐ xì) is ordinary spoken emphasis, the way English says "slowly, slowly". One reading needs pinning down: 仔 inside 仔細 is zǐ, though the automatic romanisers reach first for zǎi, its reading in 牛仔, "cowboy". The irony is quiet and complete. The danger here is not the footing. It is a fiend who has been listening to precisely this kind of anxiety.

Pilgrim replied, "Set your mind at ease, Master. We will see to it as a matter of course."

放心 literally sets the heart down — put it down, stop carrying it about. And 理會 (lǐ huì) in Ming speech means "to see to, to handle", not the modern "to understand": Wukong is promising to deal with the mountain, not to comprehend it. This is the last untroubled thing either of them says to the other.

Good Monkey King! Bearing his cudgel crosswise before the horse, he cleft open a path up the mountain, and mounting a high cliff he gazed on a scene without end:

Watch the staging. Wukong walks ahead of the horse with the cudgel held crosswise, 橫擔著棒 — 擔 is dān, the verb for carrying a load across the shoulders on a pole, and 著 is zhe, which keeps the posture going rather than completing it (not the zháo of hitting a target, nor the lexical zhuó). 剖開山路 (pōu kāi) is "to split open": he does not find the path, he cuts it. Then comes 看不盡 (kàn bú jìn), "he gazed on what could not be exhausted", and any reader of the novel knows what that means — stop, the scenery is about to be sung. It is the tag that opens a 賦, a long unrhymed set-piece built out of matched pairs of lines. On the tone: 盡 reads jìn throughout this corpus, and 不 in front of a falling tone always rises to bú, so 不盡 comes out bú jìn.

Peak upon crag heaped in layers; ravine and gully coiling round.

The set-piece opens in its tightest gear: four characters a line, two lines to a couplet, every word answering its opposite number across the pair. 重疊 is chóng dié, "stacked, one on another" — chóng, "repeated", not zhòng, "heavy". 彎環 (wān huán) is "bending into a ring", which is what a gorge does when you follow it far enough.

Tigers and wolves range in ranks; muntjac and deer move in herds.

Now the wildlife, and it arrives in formation. 成陣 (chéng zhèn) is a military word — to draw up in battle order — set against 作群 (zuò qún), to band into a herd. The predators march; the prey merely bunches. 麂 (jǐ) is the muntjac, the small barking deer of southern Chinese hills. And 行 here is xíng, "to move along", not the noun háng, "a row".

Countless river-deer and wild pig burrow thick in clusters; the whole mountainside of foxes and hares gathers in swarming droves.

This line carries the rarest character in the chapter. 𤜱 is uncommon enough that it survives mainly in dictionaries, and it is read bā: the 康熙字典 and the 集韻 both gloss it as a form of 豝 (bā), a sow or wild pig. That settles the sense, because the answering line pairs 狐兔, fox and hare, so this line needs an animal pair of its own — river-deer and wild pig. 無數 (wú shù) is "numberless", with 數 as the noun shù, "a number", not the verb shǔ, "to count". The doubled 簇簇 (cù cù) and 叢叢 (cóng cóng) do what doubling always does in this register: pile the thing higher.

A python a thousand chǐ long, a serpent of ten thousand zhàng.

The house keeps Chinese measures in Chinese. 尺 (chǐ) is a Chinese foot, roughly a third of a metre, and 丈 (zhàng) is ten of them. So the python runs to something like a hundred metres and the serpent to ten times that — which is the point. These are not measurements, they are boasts. 長 in 長蛇 is cháng, "long", not zhǎng, "to grow, senior".

The great python spews a sorrow-fog; the long serpent breathes a demon-wind.

Here the menagerie turns into weather. 噴 (pēn) and 吐 (tǔ), to spew and to breathe out, are matched across the couplet — but what these animals exhale is not breath. 愁霧 (chóu wù) is a fog made of grief; 怪風 (guài fēng) is a wind made of wrongness. This is how a landscape in this novel gives notice. The beasts are not the danger. They are the forecast. (長 is cháng again.)

Beside the road brambles trail and sprawl; upon the ridge pine and nanmu stand fair.

The couplet swaps ugliness for elegance in a single move. Down at road level, 荊棘 (jīng jí), thorn-brush, doing exactly what 牽漫 (qiān màn) says — dragging and sprawling wherever it likes. Up on the ridge, 秀麗 (xiù lì), gracefully fair. 柟 (nán) is a variant way of writing 楠, the nanmu, a slow-growing hardwood so prized that emperors reserved it for palace pillars and coffins.

Fig-vine and creeper fill the eye; fragrant grasses reach to the sky.

薜蘿 (bì luó) is a compressed pair: the fig-creeper 薜荔 and the dodder 女蘿. In the poetic tradition these are the vines that hang over a hermit's hut, an association running back to the 楚辭 (Chǔ cí), the Songs of Chu. Dropping them in here tells the reader the mountain is unpeopled in a specific, literary way — not merely empty, but the sort of place a recluse would choose. 連天 (lián tiān), "joined to the sky", opens the frame out to the horizon.

Its shadow falls north of the dark blue deep; the clouds part south of the Dipper's handle.

The camera pulls back hard. 滄溟 (cāng míng) is the grey-green deep at the edge of the world, and 斗柄 (dǒu bǐng) is the handle of the Northern Dipper — the three stars whose slow swing around the pole told the old calendar what season it was. A clock hand the size of the sky. The 斗 is dǒu, dipper or ladle, not dòu. Two lines, and the mountain has grown big enough to throw its shadow across an ocean and part the clouds under a constellation.

Through ten thousand ages it has held the primal breath grown old; its thousand peaks tower ranked in the cold of the sun's light.

The set-piece signs off on deep time. 元氣 (yuán qì) is the primal breath — the single undivided stuff everything else is supposed to have condensed out of at the beginning — and the mountain is imagined as having held it, ageing, for 萬古 (wàn gǔ), ten thousand ages. 巍列 (wēi liè): towering in ranks. Then the last three characters, 日光寒 (rì guāng hán) — sunlight, and it is cold. The rhapsody has spent nine couplets building a stage, and it leaves it lit and empty. Something is about to walk onto it.