Master and disciples made their way up the mountain — utterly precipitous it was, and truly craggy and towering.

They start climbing, and the narrator reaches for the big words. 嵯峨, cuó é, "jagged and towering." In 上得山來 the 得 is the light de linking verb to result.

A fine mountain! —

好山, hǎo shān — "what a mountain!" Two characters and a colon: the storyteller clearing his throat before a set-piece poem. Everything that follows until the next stretch of dialogue is that poem.

Lofty, lofty, the steep ranges; sheer, sheer, the pointed peaks.

The poem opens with doubled words, the standard trick for making a landscape loom. 巍巍, wēi wēi, "high, high"; 削削, xuē xuē, "sheer, sheer" — 削 read xuē, the sense of a thing pared with a knife.

Below, deep ravines coil and wind; at the brink, lone crags rise sheer.

灣環, wān huán, "looping and coiling," of a ravine; 陡崖, dǒu yá, a cliff that drops straight down.

Below the coiling deep ravines, one hears only the splash and churn as a water-sporting python rolls its bulk;

The poem now takes each half of the previous line and expands it. First the ravine: 唿喇喇, hū lā lā, is the noise itself, water being thrashed — the characters are chosen for sound, not sense. 蟒, mǎng, is a python. 得 is de.

at the lone sheer crag-edge, one sees only, jutting and jagged, a tiger come out of the wood, its tail snapping.

Then the cliff. 崒嵂嵂, zú lǜ lǜ, "craggy and sawtoothed"; 剪尾, "scissoring the tail," the flick a big cat gives before it moves. 那 is nà.

Look upward: the peak-crowns thrust abruptly through the blue empyrean;

Look up. 突兀, tū wù, "sticking out abruptly" — still the ordinary modern word for something that appears out of nowhere. 青霄, qīng xiāo, "the blue heights."

turn the eye: the gorge-depths sink profound, bordering the azure void.

Look down. 碧落, bì luò, "the azure void," is properly a Daoist name for the highest heaven, so a gorge that "borders" it is a nice piece of vertigo: the drop is so deep it comes out at the sky. 壑 is hè, a gorge.

Climbing high, it is like a ladder, like a footstool;

似梯似凳, sì tī sì dèng, "like a ladder, like a stool" — 似 read sì.

descending low, it is like a moat, like a pit.

如塹如坑, rú qiàn rú kēng, "like a moat, like a pit." Up is furniture you climb; down is a hole you fall into.

Truly these are weird and wondrous summit-ranges; sure enough, these are serried points and sheer-cut cliff-walls.

The poem restates its subject before the second half. 巔峰嶺, diān fēng lǐng, "peak-and-summit ridges"; 削壁崖, "pared-wall cliffs," 削 again xuē.

On the summit-ranges the herb-gatherer, pondering, dreads to go;

採藥人, cǎi yào rén, the herb-gatherer who works high ground for medicinal plants. 尋思, "to turn a thing over in the mind."

before the sheer cliff-walls the woodcutter finds each inch of ground hard to tread.

And the second figure. 打柴夫, dǎ chái fū, the woodcutter — remember him, because one steps out of the scenery and into the story in the very next passage. 寸步難行, "you cannot advance an inch," is still the everyday phrase for being completely stuck, in traffic or in a negotiation.

Wild sheep and feral horses dart and shuttle in confusion; cunning hares and mountain oxen stand as if drawn up in ranks.

攛梭, cuān suō, "to dart like a weaver's shuttle." 佈陣, bù zhèn, "drawn up in battle order" — the text writes 佈, the fuller written form of 布. Hares and oxen standing in ranks: even the wildlife here looks like an army.

The mountain's height veils the sun and screens the Dipper's stars; ever and again one meets goblin-beasts and grey wolves.

星斗, xīng dǒu, "the stars and the Dipper," with 斗 read dǒu. 蒼狼, the grey wolf. A mountain so high it blocks out the sky, and full of things with teeth.

The grassy path, blurred and overgrown, is hard to urge a horse along — how shall one reach the Thunderclap, to look upon the Buddha-King?

The poem ends by remembering what all this is for. 雷音, Léi yīn, is Thunderclap Monastery, the Buddha's seat in the far west and the whole point of the journey. 怎得, zěn dé, "how is one to reach" — 得 here dé; 佛 is fó.