Master and disciples were just at their walking when all at once another great mountain met them and blocked the road ahead.

A mountain drops across the road, which in this novel is always the opening of an episode — the formula 忽然又遇, "all at once they met with another", is the equivalent of a chapter break. In 正當行處, 當 is dāng, at the time of, and 處 is the noun chù, so the phrase means "just at the point of walking".

The path was narrow, the cliff high, the stones many, the ridge steep; neither man nor horse could get through.

Four balanced clauses of four characters each, inside ordinary prose. 難 is nán, hard to do, not the noun nàn, calamity.

Tripitaka reined in on his horse and called out: "Disciples."

兜住韁繩 is to rein in. This is the only ordinary, everyday use of 兜 in the chapter; the character comes back as the name of the mountain and the cave, where the 世德堂本 in fact prints a different character altogether — one with the mountain radical added, which Unicode has never encoded.

At once Pilgrim Sun brought Zhu Bajie and Sha Monk forward to stand in attendance, and said: "Master, what are your orders?"

侍立 puts the disciples in the posture of servants standing before a master. The novel keeps the household formalities up even on a snowbound mountain track.

Tripitaka said: "Look how high that mountain is ahead. I fear tigers and wolves may work mischief there, and monstrous beasts do men harm. This time we must take care without fail!"

那 is the pointing nà — that mountain, the one in view. 仔細 reads zǐ xì. The master's warning is precise about entirely the wrong danger: what is waiting up there is neither tiger nor wolf.

Pilgrim said: "Set your mind at ease, Master, and do not fret. We three brothers are of one heart and one mind; we have turned to the right and seek the true, and we can put forth arts that sweep off freaks and subdue fiends. What are tigers, wolves or monstrous beasts to us?"

降 is xiáng, to subdue, as in 蕩怪降妖 in this very line — not jiàng, to send down. 甚麼 is shén me. 歸正求真, turning to the right and seeking the true, is the pilgrimage stated as doctrine. The boast is the hinge of the whole chapter: it is confidence, not fear, that loses the master.

Hearing this, Tripitaka could only open his heart and go forward.

只得 is "could only", with 得 as dé, what one manages or must. 放懷 is to let the heart go loose — the very loosening the lyric warned against at the head of the chapter.

Reaching the mouth of the valley, he urged the horse up the cliff, raised his head and looked closely. What a mountain:

好山 followed by a colon is the storyteller's cue for a set-piece: everything from here to the end of the passage is verse. 觀看 is guān kàn; 仔細 again zǐ xì.

Craggy and towering, sheer-cut and lofty.

嵯峨 (craggy) and 矗矗 (standing tall) are stock mountain words. 變削 is what the 世德堂本 prints and it is kept, though 變, "to change", sits oddly in a slot that ought to hold a shape-word to pair with 嵯峨; the phrase repeats identically in the next line, so it is the edition's reading and not a one-off slip of the block-cutter's knife. 削 reads xuē in the sense "sheer, cut away", not the colloquial xiāo, to pare.

Craggy and towering, it drives into the Milky Way; sheer-cut and lofty, it bars the blue void.

The standard opening move of these long descriptive poems: state a pair of four-character phrases, then take each half and expand it into a seven-character line. 霄漢 is the high sky, understood as the Milky Way.

Strange stones heaped in disorder like crouching tigers; grey pines hung aslant like flying dragons.

The paired simile, 如 … 似 …, is fixed furniture in these set-pieces. Tiger and dragon turn up first as figures of speech. The chapter will produce a real horned beast soon enough.

On the ridge birds cry in tender, lovely measure; before the cliff plum opens with a rare, thick scent.

Plum in flower dates the scene to deep winter and nothing else does it so economically. 嬌韻 is the tender cadence of a bird's cry, 異香 a fragrance out of the ordinary.

The gully water purls and runs out cold; cloud on the summit darkens and comes over fierce.

潺湲 is the purl of running water; 黯淡 a dulled, darkened colour. This couplet is the hinge of the set-piece, where a pleasant winter landscape turns threatening.

And see there: whirling snow, biting wind, and a starved tiger roaring in the hills.

又見那, "and see there", is an internal pointer inside a run of verse already under way, so it does not open a fresh set-piece. The line breaks the seven-character pattern into three short measures, which is how these rhapsodies change gear. 那 is the pointing nà; 中 is zhōng, within.

Cold crows pick over the trees and find nowhere to roost; wild deer hunt for a lair and leave no settled track.

Both halves say the same thing about shelter: there is none. 處 is chù, a place. Crows with nowhere to roost and deer with nowhere to lie up prepare the pilgrims' own want of shelter — and so the mirage that answers it.

Pity the traveller who can hardly take a step, who knits his brow, wears a careworn face, and muffles his head.

The rhapsody ends by turning round on the reader's own party: 行人 is the traveller in general and these travellers in particular. 把頭蒙, pulling something over your head against the cold, is a plain domestic gesture set at the close of a grand description — and the last word of a mountain panorama is a man with his coat over his ears.