Eight Rules took the lead in front and Sha Monk followed behind; they came out of the pine wood and gained the high road. You should have seen the two of them, jabbering and grumbling, muttering and complaining, while Tripitaka did nothing but make peace between them.

After the tension of the cave, the group reverts to type: bickering. 當頭領路 is to lead from the front. The quarrel is carried by two doubled sound-words, 嚌嚌嘈嘈 (jì jì cáo cáo), a jabbering hubbub, and 埋埋怨怨, where both characters 埋 read mán, from 埋怨 (mán yuàn), to grumble and complain — still the ordinary modern word for it. 解和 is to smooth things over, and it is what Tripitaka spends the whole journey doing.

At nightfall they would seek lodging first; at cockcrow they would rise to watch the sky. Stage by stage, past long pavilions and short, before they knew it they had gone two hundred and ninety-nine lǐ. Then, raising their heads of a sudden, they saw a fine city before them — and this was the Land of Precious Images.

A travel formula does the work of several weeks: 遇晚先投宿，雞鳴早看天 — find lodging at nightfall, check the sky at cockcrow — a five-and-five couplet that the novel uses whenever distance needs covering quickly. 長亭短亭 (長 = cháng) are the long and short roadside pavilions, spaced along the highway at set intervals as rest-stops and parting-places, so that "past long pavilions and short" means much what "one service station after another" would mean now. Then a small piece of arithmetic worth catching: the princess told Tripitaka her city lay 三百餘里, three hundred lǐ and more, to the west; the narrator counts the road at 二百九十九里, two hundred and ninety-nine. She was guessing, and she guessed slightly long. 寶象國 is the Land of Precious Images, the chapter's destination.