Pilgrim gave his body a heave and leapt up onto the clouds; shading his eyes with a hand like an awning, he opened them wide and looked about.

手搭涼篷 — a hand raised like a little awning — is the stock gesture for shading the eyes to scan a distance, and it is worth picturing: Wukong standing on a cloud with one hand across his brow, like a lookout in a crow's nest. Two readings. The 將 of 將身一縱 is jiāng, the word that hauls the object to the front of a sentence — taking his body, he gave one bound — not jiàng, "a general". And the 觀 of 觀看 is the plain verb guān, "to look", the one in 觀音, not the guàn that names a Daoist temple.

Alas, the road to the West was drear and desolate indeed — not a hamlet or homestead anywhere — a country, in truth, where one met many trees but seldom the smoke of men.

人煙 (rén yān) is one of those phrases that draws its own picture: "the smoke of people" — cooking fires, therefore houses, therefore anyone at all. A place with no 人煙 is a place where nobody has lit a fire. 可憐 here is not "lovable" but the narrator sighing, alas; 甚 is shèn, "extremely". None of this is idle scenery. The novel is establishing on the record that there is nobody within miles — which is what will make the young woman who walks up in a moment so impossible, and so plainly a fake to everyone except the one man who matters.

After looking a good while, he spied due south a high mountain, and on its sunlit face a single patch of bright red.

A patch of red on a sunny slope. 向陽 (xiàng yáng) is the side that faces the sun, where fruit ripens first — and that is the hinge of the entire plot, disguised as scenery. The 子 of 點子, "a spot", is the toneless zi that makes a plain noun.

Pilgrim pressed his cloud down and said, "Master, there's food to be had!"

按下雲頭 (àn xià yún tóu) is "to press the cloud's head down", which is how one lands. The 了 ending 有吃的了 is the le that announces a change of state: there was no food, now there is. He is delighted. He is also walking into the trap — the demon overhead needs exactly one thing to happen, and this is it.

The elder asked what it was.

Seven characters of bridge, and one thing worth catching: 甚 here is shén, "what", the one inside 甚麼 — not the shèn, "extremely", from two lines back. Same character, two jobs.

Pilgrim said, "There are no houses here to beg a meal from, but on that southern mountain is a patch of red — ripe mountain peaches, surely, by now. I'll go pluck a few to stave off your hunger."

充饑 (chōng jī) is exactly "to take the edge off": to stop a hunger, not to make a meal of it. 熟透了 (shú tòu le), ripened right the way through; 山桃 (shān táo), the wild mountain peach — and Wukong, of all people, knows his peaches. Watch what the novel does with this small kind errand. He will come back with the fruit. By the time he does, the demon will have been killed three times and his master deceived three times, and nobody will care about peaches.

Tripitaka said gladly, "If a monk may have peaches to eat, that would be a rare blessing indeed."

出家人 — one who has left the household — is the ordinary word for a monk, and it is quietly doing work here: a man who owns nothing counts a few wild peaches as a windfall. 上分 is a superior 分, and that is fèn, "an allotted share, one's portion of luck", not fēn, "to divide"; 為 is the linking wéi, "counts as". He is humbly and genuinely pleased. Remember this line when he sits down to write the dismissal.

Pilgrim took up his alms-bowl, sprang aloft on an auspicious light — and see him now, somersault swaying, cold air whistling by — in an instant he was off to the southern mountain to pick peaches: but of that no more for now.

不題 (bù tí) — of this, no more for now — is the storyteller's scene-change, the equivalent of a hard cut. Notice where it cuts to: the master, alone. 觔斗 (jīn dǒu) is a variant way of writing 筋斗, a somersault, and its 斗 is dǒu — the same one in 觔斗雲, his somersault-cloud — not dòu. The doubled 幌幌 (huǎng huǎng) and 颼颼 (sōu sōu) are motion and sound, swaying and whistling; they do for the ear what a drawn whoosh does in a comic strip. 缽盂 (bō yú) is the monk's alms-bowl, doubling here as a fruit basket.