The Pilgrim gave a single bound of his frame and vaulted clear across the Eastern Ocean, reaching the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit in no time at all. Pressing down his cloud-head and staring wide-eyed about him, he saw the mountain's flowers and grasses all gone, its mists and rosy clouds utterly spent; the peaks and crags had crumbled, the forests and trees were scorched and withered. How had it come to this? Only because, when he had raised his uproar in Heaven and been hauled up to the upper realm, this mountain had been set ablaze and ruined by the Manifest Sage, the god Erlang, who had led against it the seven sworn brothers of Plum Mountain. At this the Great Sage's grief was doubled. There is an old-style poem on the ruin and desolation of the mountain to bear witness. The poem says:

He clears the ocean in a single jump and lands on a corpse. Everything the mountain was — flowers, grass, coloured mists, standing timber — is gone, and the narrator breaks off to tell you why: this is what Erlang and his seven sworn brothers left behind when they burned the place during the Havoc in Heaven. 將 is jiāng, the small word that picks up an object and hands it to the verb — 將身一縱, took his body and flung it. 倒塌 has 倒 as dǎo, toppled. 盡 is jìn, utterly. 為證 takes wéi, to serve as. 那 points three times over — 那行者, 那山上, 那梅山 — and is nà each time. The brothers are the 梅山七聖, whom the chapter calls the 梅山七弟兄.

Looking back on the immortal mountain, tears fall from both his eyes; facing it in its ruin, his grief and sorrow only deepen.

The poem starts outside Wukong, watching him weep at the ruin. Hold that: it does not stay outside him for long.

In those days he thought the mountain could take no harm; only today does he learn that the very ground can fail.

只道 then 方知 — thought all along, and only now finds out. It is the shape of every belated recognition: the thing you assumed could never break has broken, and the assumption goes down with it.

Hateful, that Erlang came to wipe me out; loathsome, how that lesser sage lorded it over my folk.

And there is the turn. Two lines in, the survey drops away and Wukong is speaking in his own voice, naming his enemy. 二郎 is Erlang, the god who ran him down and took him prisoner during the Havoc in Heaven. 將 is jiāng again, took and — took me and wiped me out.

In his cruelty he dug up your ancestors' hallowed graves; for no cause he broke the foundations of your forebears' tombs.

先靈墓 and 祖墳基, ancestral graves and the foundations of forebears' tombs. The burning of a mountain is being charged as grave-desecration, which in this culture is close to the worst thing one can be accused of — not property damage but an attack on the dead.

The rosy mists that filled the sky are all swept clean away; the winds and clouds across the land are scattered thin and gone.

盡 is jìn, all of it, entirely.

On the eastern ridge no striped tiger's roar is heard; on the western hill, where now the cry of a white ape?

那 is nǎ here, the questioning one: where would you find such a thing now? Not a question expecting an answer — the answer is nowhere, and both halves of the couplet know it.

In the northern streams no track of fox or hare remains; in the southern valley the river deer and the wild sow pass without a shadow left behind.

This line is the previous chapter turned inside out. There the same mountain swarmed — countless 獐𤜱 in clusters, 狐兔 thick all over the slopes — and here both pairs are named again to say they have gone: no track of fox or hare in the north, not a shadow of 獐𤜱 in the south. Both are game animals. 獐 is the river deer, small, hornless and tusked, the beast the old dictionaries call the tusked zhāng; it is a Chinese animal, not the roe deer of Europe, which Chinese calls by another name. 𤜱 is bā, a wild sow — a female boar in her second year. It is a genuinely rare character: the standard character databases record a pronunciation for it and no meaning at all. The novel uses it in the previous chapter and here, and then lets it go.

The blue-grey stones are burned to a thousand clods of earth; the emerald sands are turned to a single heap of mud.

千塊土 against 一堆泥 — a thousand clods, one heap of mud. Stone and sand, the two things a mountain is made of, counted out as the rubbish they have been reduced to.

Outside the cave the tall pines all lean and topple; before the cliff the green cypress stand sparse and few.

The rhyme changes here, and the sound of the poem goes flat and open. 倒 is dǎo, toppled; 盡 is jìn; 少 is shǎo, few.

Cedar and fir, pagoda-tree and juniper, chestnut and sandalwood, all charred; peach and apricot, plum and mei, pear and jujube, all done for.

Twelve trees in fourteen characters, six charred and six finished — the line reads like an inventory taken after a fire, because that is what it is. 椿 is the Chinese toon, long sold in English nurseries as Chinese cedar. The last character is the one to watch: 了 is liǎo, done for, a full verb rhyming with 少, 鳥 and 草 in the surrounding lines — not the everyday grammatical le it looks like.

Cudrania gone and mulberry vanished — how now to raise the silkworms? Willows thinned and bamboo few — hard for the birds to roost.

The catalogue turns practical and that is what makes it bleak: with the mulberry gone there is no silk, and with the bamboo thinned there is nowhere for a bird to sleep. A ruined economy, in fourteen characters. 少 is shǎo; 難 is nán, hard to do.

On the peak the wondrous stones are turned to dust; at the ravine's bottom the springs run dry, all grown to grass.

為 is wéi, to become. 乾 is gān, dry — worth flagging, because the same character is qián in 乾坤, Heaven-and-Earth, which the chapter uses later on. Two readings, two different words. 都 is dōu, all.

Before the cliff the blackened earth has buried iris and orchid; beside the path the reddened mud is overrun by vine and creeper.

土黑 against 泥紅: black earth, red mud. The couplet is built on a pair of colours, and both of them are what fire leaves.

The birds that flew here in days gone by — to what place do they fly now? The beasts that ran here in that time — over what mountain do they run?

那 is nǎ, which place. 當時 takes dāng, in that time. Two questions with the same shape and the same silence after them.

Leopards shun, and pythons loathe, this place of ruin and collapse; cranes keep away, and snakes turn back, from the midst of the wreck.

間 is jiān, the midst of. Even the leopards and the snakes want nothing to do with the place, which is the last word in desolation: not that the beautiful creatures have fled, but that the ugly ones have.

It must be that in days past he harbored thoughts of evil, and so today he suffers these hardships and this grief.

行 is xíng, to do or commit; 難 is nán, hardship. The poem ends by handing the blame to the speaker. Whatever Erlang did, the wreckage is being read as the price of Wukong's own past — and it is Wukong saying so.