The monster sat alone at the head of the feast, ranged to left and right by none but figures of lovely form and tender grace.

Both instances of 那 are pointing nà; 都, "all, none but," is dōu. 艷質嬌姿 — lovely substance, tender bearing — arranges eighteen delicate figures around one seated animal, and waits.

See how he took his ease and drank; and when the second watch came on and the drunkenness rose in him, he could no longer hold back his wildness:

二更時分 is the second night-watch, roughly nine to eleven in the evening. The character 更 is gēng here, the watch-of-the-night reading — not the gèng that means "still, even more," which is the same character doing an entirely different job. In 醉將上來, the drunkenness coming up in him, the 將 is jiāng; 胡為, to run riot, takes 為 as wéi.

He sprang up, gave one great roar of laughter, showed his true form, and — his savagery bursting out — spread a hand broad as a winnowing-basket, snatched over one of the girls who played the pipa, and with a crunch took a bite out of her head.

本相, true form, takes 相 as xiàng; in 抓將過來 the 將 carrying the motion is jiāng. 扢咋 is the sound of it, the crunch — the novel puts the noise in before the injury. 彈琵琶 is to play the pipa, the four-stringed lute. And the hand is 簸箕大 again, the winnowing basket from the scene where he dragged the princess by the hair: the same homely comparison, now doing something far worse.

The other seventeen palace maids, frightened for their very lives, fled and hid in wild disorder, this way and that. See them now:

嚇得 takes 得 as de; 亂藏, hiding in confusion, takes 藏 as cáng. Both instances of 那 are pointing nà. Seventeen now, where there were eighteen. The lead-in 你看那 starts the verse.

The palace maids in dread, the serving-girls in sudden fright;

The verse opens by naming the two groups and their terror flatly, to be expanded in the couplets that follow.

the palace maids in dread, like lotus blossoms lashed by rain and veiled in the rain of night;

The first comparison: the trembling maids are 芙蓉, lotus flowers, beaten down by rain. 似 is sì, "like." Note what is happening — the poem has begun making the scene beautiful.

the serving-girls in fright, like peonies tossed by the wind, dancing in the spring wind.

The matching comparison: the fleeing girls are 芍藥, peonies, shaken by wind. Two lines, and a room full of women running from a cannibal has become a garden in a storm.

Smashing their lutes to save their lives, bruised and stumbling over zither and lyre as they flee;

琴瑟 are the zither (琴) and the many-stringed 瑟. The instruments of the entertainment are underfoot.

Out the doors, what heed for north or south; away from the hall, no minding west from east.

Here 那分南北 means "what telling of north from south," so 那 is the rhetorical nǎ — the first time in the chapter the character is read that way standing on its own, outside the compound 那裡. It answers 不管西東, "no minding west from east," in the second half of the couplet.

Their jade faces knocked and marred, their tender features bruised and torn;

玉面 and 嬌容, jade faces and tender features, return us to the beauty catalogued at the opening of the feast, now knocked about in the rush for the doors.

each one fleeing for her life, every one running to save what remained of it.

The closing couplet strips everything down to survival — 殘生, "the remnant of life" — completing the turn from ornament to terror.