黑水滔天 但見奇觀 Black Water to the Sky; a Wondrous Sight Beheld
師徒們正話間，腳走不停，馬蹄正疾，見前面有一道黑水滔天，馬不能進。四眾停立岸邊，仔細觀看，但見那：师徒们正话间，脚走不停，马蹄正疾，见前面有一道黑水滔天，马不能进。四众停立岸边，仔细观看，但见那：
逐句解 Line by line
As master and disciples talked on, their feet not halting and the horse's hooves at a brisk pace, they saw before them a stretch of black water that surged to the sky, and the horse could go no further.
The horse balks before any of the four has said a word. 黑水滔天, black water surging to the sky, is the chapter title's 黑河 seen for the first time.
The four reined in at the bank and looked closely, and this is what they beheld:
但見那 is the tag that opens a showcase description - "and this is what met their eyes." What follows is a 賦 or rhapsody: a long, unrhymed set-piece that piles up images of one thing, here the river itself.
Layer upon layer of thick billows, fold upon fold of turbid waves — the layered billows churn up a black flood, the folded waves roll up a dark oil.
The opening move: two four-character phrases, 層層濃浪 and 疊疊渾波, each then reused as the head of a seven-character line. The device sets a rhythm going before any image arrives.
Seen near, it throws back no shadow of a man; gazed at from afar, no shape of tree can be traced in it.
Near and far, 近觀 against 遠望, the standard pair for taking in a view. The water returns no reflection and no outline - it gives nothing back at all.
Rolling — a whole earth of ink; surging — a thousand lǐ of ash.
Ink and ash for the flood's two colours. These are the only five-character lines in the rhapsody.
Its froth drifts up like heaped charcoal, its spray flies off like tumbling coal.
Heaped charcoal and tumbling coal - and note that the couplet uses two different words for "like," 如 and 似, rather than repeating one.
Oxen and sheep will not drink of it; crows and magpies can barely fly across.
Beasts will not drink it, birds can hardly cross it. This four-character pair comes back expanded in the very next line, exactly as the opening pair did.
Oxen and sheep will not drink, misliking its deep blackness; crows and magpies can barely fly, dreading its boundless waste.
The expansion supplies each creature with a reason: blackness for the cattle, endless distance for the birds.
Only the reeds and duckweed on the bank keep the reckoning of the seasons, and the flowers and grasses on the shoal vie in their fresh and wondrous green.
The one living thing here that still keeps time. 蘋 is pín, the water-clover, not the píng of the apple.
Lakes and meres, rivers and streams, the world holds in plenty; brooks and springs, marshes and grottoes, the age has in abundance.
Eight kinds of water in eight characters - 湖泊江河, 溪源澤洞 - massed for one purpose only, which is to set this river apart from all of them.
In every human life there is some place of meeting — yet who has ever set eyes on the Black-Water River of the West?
The rhapsody ends on a question, and on a new rhyme. The five line-ends before it, from 灰 through to 奇, had all closed on the same -i sound; this one breaks the pattern at the same moment the sense does.
They reach the river, and the novel stops the plot to look at it. What follows is a 賦, a rhapsody, in the 但見 mode - the set-piece description that a Ming storyteller would deliver as a performance in its own right.
The colour scheme is unusually consistent: ink, oil, charcoal, coal, ash. Everything in the poem is black or the residue of burning, and the water is defined almost entirely by what it will not do - it throws back no reflection, shows no shape of tree, will not be drunk, will barely be flown over. Against all that, a single line of bankside reeds and flowers that still know what season it is, and the contrast is doing real work.
It closes by naming eight other kinds of water, the world's full stock of lakes and rivers and marshes, and then asking who has ever seen this one. The rhetorical question does the job an establishing shot does in a film: the river has been made strange enough that anything can now come out of it.