When the Great Sage saw the men spreading up over his mountain, his heart blazed with fury. He worked a finger-spell, and murmured an incantation under his breath; drawing in a breath toward the Xun quarter, he blew it out with a whoosh — and there rose a gale. A fine wind! Behold:

He does not draw a weapon. He makes a hand-sign, mutters, breathes in toward the southeast and blows. 巽地 is the Xun quarter, the southeast, one of the eight trigrams and the one that stands for wind — so he is not summoning a gale so much as drawing on the direction wind belongs to. 心中 takes zhōng; 那 is nà, twice; 吹將 takes jiāng.

It flung up the dust and scattered the soil, toppled the trees and shattered the woods.

倒 is dǎo, toppled. The wind-rhapsody opens on four-character phrases, quick and flat.

The sea-waves reared like mountains; the turbid billows pressed in, ten thousand folds deep.

A gale on dry land, described entirely as a storm at sea — mountains of water, ten thousand folds of it. The mountain has no sea on it. The wind is being measured against the ocean he crossed to get here.

Heaven and earth turned murky and reeling; sun and moon went dim and sunken.

乾坤 is qián kūn, Heaven-and-Earth, the two primal trigrams standing in for the whole world. Worth pausing on: 乾 is qián here, but the same character was gān, dry, back in the wasteland poem. One character, two unrelated words.

One gust shook the pines like a tiger's roar; of a sudden it entered the bamboo like a dragon's moan.

似 is sì, like. Pines roaring like a tiger, bamboo moaning like a dragon: the wind is given the voices of the two beasts the hunters were just compared to.

Ten thousand hollows howled in fury as Heaven belched its breath; flying sand and hurtling stones struck men down at random.

萬竅怒號, ten thousand hollows howling in fury, and 天噫氣, Heaven belching out its breath. Both come from the opening of the Zhuangzi, where the wind is the earth's breath blowing through every hollow it finds and each hollow gives it a different voice. The novel takes the most famous passage in Chinese writing about wind and turns it into a murder weapon.

The Great Sage, having raised this great wind, sent the broken stones riding upon it, flying and whirling wildly. Pity, then, those thousand-odd men and horses, each and every one of them:

乘風 takes chéng, riding the wind. 將那 takes jiāng and nà; 那些 is nà. The stones go up, and the passage pivots into one of the strangest set-pieces in the book.

Stones struck the aconite-heads to powder; sand flew and the sea-horses were all maimed.

Here is the trick, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Every image in this dirge is the name of a drug from the Chinese pharmacy, chosen because the name also describes a dead man. 烏頭 is aconite root, and it is written black head. 海馬 is the dried seahorse of the medicine chest, and it is written sea horse — so the cavalry go down in the same breath as the remedy. The whole slaughter is being reported in the vocabulary of a prescription.

Ginseng and cassia-officinalis scrambled before the ridge; blood dyed the cinnabar upon the ground.

It keeps going. 人參 is ginseng, written man root — 參 is shēn here, not cān. 官桂 is a graded cinnamon bark, written official cassia, so the officers fall with it. 朱砂 is cinnabar, the red mineral, which gives the line its blood without ever naming blood as anything but a mineral on the ground.

The aconite-sons could hardly find their old homes; the areca-nuts, how were they to win their way back to their villages?

The two best puns in the passage. 附子 is the daughter-root of aconite, written attached son — so these are somebody's sons, who will not be coming home. 檳榔 is the areca nut, and it sounds exactly like 賓郎, the guest-lad, the young man far from his own village. 得 is dé, to manage to; 還鄉 takes huán, to go back, not hái.

Their corpses, light as calomel-powder, lay strewn across the mountain field; and the red lady at home kept watch and waited.

And the last turn of the screw. 輕粉 is calomel, a white mercury powder, so the corpses lie light as dust. 紅娘子 is a medicinal blister-beetle whose name reads, word for word, as red lady — and the line puts her at home, watching the road. The dirge ends not on the battlefield but in a doorway, with a wife who does not know yet. 中 takes zhōng. 山場 takes 場 as chǎng, a place or ground — the reading for somewhere you stand, as against the cháng that counts an event, which the chapter uses later for a bout of fighting.

A poem says:

詩曰 — a poem says. The tag stands as its own segment because the source sets it on its own line, between the verse it follows and the verse it introduces. It cannot be folded into what precedes it, since that is verse too.

Men slain and horses dead — how were they to go home? Their wild ghosts and lonely souls lay tangled thick as hemp.

亂似麻 takes 似 as sì, like: tangled like hemp, a knot of loose fibres nobody is going to sort out. Applied to souls, it means unburied and unaccounted for.

Pity the dauntless, spirited captains — the wind told worthy from worthless none, and blood dyed all the sand.

將 is jiàng here, a captain — the noun, not the jiāng that pushes an object at a verb. And then 不辨賢愚: it told the worthy from the worthless not at all. That is the poem's verdict on the whole dazzling performance, delivered in four flat words after twenty lines of virtuosity.