This lyric, set to the tune "Nanke zi", speaks only of how the Tang Monk shed the calamity of the ice on the River That Leads to Heaven, and crossed to the far bank on the back of the white turtle.

南柯子 is the name of the tune the lyric was written to, not a title of its own — song-lyrics were composed to fit existing melodies, the way a hymn is written to a known tune. The tune takes its name from the Tang tale of Chunyu Fen, who dreamed a whole career under a southern bough of a locust tree; 子 in tune names reads zǐ. 單道著 marks the lyric as looking backwards, to Ch.47 through 49: the white 黿, a soft-shelled river turtle, ferried the pilgrims across and asked them to put a question to the Buddha for it — a debt the novel calls in much later, and with consequences. 著 is the zhe that marks a continuing state.

Master and disciples, four of them, followed the high road and pressed on toward the west.

One line of stitching to put the party back on the road. 著 is again zhe.

It was deep winter, and this is what met the eye: the light of the woods lay dim and spreading within the haze, the bone of the hills stood sharp-ridged and clear beyond the water.

This is a couplet — a pair of matched lines — and it is set as ordinary prose rather than as verse. The reason is the printer's, not the editor's: it carries the pointer 但見那 but no colon and no line of its own, which is how the 世德堂本 marks off a set-piece. 漠漠 (dim, spreading) and 稜稜 (sharp-ridged) are doubled words, and the doubling is what makes them descriptive. 山骨 is the rock of the hills seen as bone. 那 is the pointing nà, that; 中 is zhōng, within.