Alas! The elder's hour of ill luck had come. Watch him stride out and go straight up to the pagoda. And there he saw:

The narrator sighs out loud before the description starts — his hour of ill luck had come — so the reader walks into the beautiful passage that follows already knowing how it ends. 長老 takes zhǎng; 那 is nà.

The stone cliff rose ten thousand zhàng; the mountain, vast, touched the blue empyrean.

石崖高萬丈 is a cliff ten thousand zhàng high, a zhàng being a Chinese measure of roughly ten feet. Ten thousand of them is not a number, it is a way of saying immeasurable. The rhapsody opens on grandeur, and the grandeur is a lie.

Its roots joined the thickness of the earth; its peaks pierced the height of heaven.

根連地厚 against 峰插天高: roots into the depth of the earth, peaks into the height of heaven. The cliff is given the whole vertical world in eight characters.

On either side, some thousands of mingled trees; before and behind, vines twining a hundred lǐ and more.

兩邊 then 前後 — either side, then front and back. Having taken the vertical, the couplet now takes the horizontal, so that the scene expands on every axis at once.

Flowers lit the grass-tips — the wind cast shadows; water ran through cloud-hollows — the moon had no root.

月無根, the moon has no root. It is the reflected moon on moving water, beautiful and with nothing underneath it — which is a precise description of this entire landscape and, in a few minutes, of the pagoda too.

Fallen trees lay athwart the deep ravine; withered vines hung knotted on the bare peak.

橫擔 takes 擔 as dān, to lie across or span — the verb. Compare the hunters' hundred-odd loads a few passages back, where the same character was dàn, the load itself. Verb and noun, one character. 倒木 takes 倒 as dǎo, fallen.

Below the stone bridge ran the tumbling clear spring; upon the terrace-seat spread the bright, bright white bloom.

長 is zhǎng here, to grow — a verb, set in parallel against flows in the first half of the line. Not the cháng that means long. 臺座上 is the terrace-seat, and the bright white on it is mineral bloom on the stone, the crust damp rock throws up.

Seen from afar, it seemed the paradise of the Three Isles; seen close to, it had the look of Penglai's fairest scene.

And here is the deception at full strength. 三島 are the three isles of the immortals in the eastern sea, and 蓬萊 is the most famous of them — the Chinese paradise, the place voyagers set out for and never reached. The place looks like heaven from far off and like heaven up close. 似 is sì, like.

Fragrant pines and purple bamboo ringed the mountain stream; crows and magpies, gibbons and monkeys, threaded the steep ranges.

Fragrant pine, purple bamboo, magpies, gibbons. The paradise is still holding.

Outside the cave-mouth, beasts came and went in rows; within the wood, birds flew out and in by flocks.

And there is the tell, sitting in the middle of the fairyland: 洞門, a cave-mouth, with animals filing in and out of it. Temples do not have cave-mouths. Demons do. 走獸成行 takes 行 as háng, a row or file — the first of only two places in the whole chapter where this character is not xíng.

Green, green, the fragrant grasses flourished; bright, bright, the wild flowers bloomed.

青青 and 艷艷 double their own characters — green green, bright bright — a doubling Chinese uses to soften and warm a description, the way English says lovely and green. It is the last note of counterfeit spring before the verdict.

This place, plain to see, was an evil ground — and the luckless elder came blundering straight in.

And the mask comes off in one line. After Penglai and the immortals' isles: this place, plain to see, was evil ground. 分明是惡境 takes 分 as fēn, plainly. 撞將來 takes jiāng — and 撞 is the verb for blundering into something, which is what the luckless elder is doing while the poem watches.