As they went along, they came of a sudden upon a small river, its water clear and limpid, its cold ripples deep.

正…處 is the frame just at the point of, with 處 read chù. 澄澄 and 湛湛 are a matched pair of doubled descriptions, and the river they describe is entirely unremarkable — which is the whole point. Nothing whatever marks this out as the 子母河.

The Tang elder reined in his horse and looked, and made out on the far bank willow shade hanging green, with a few rafters of thatched roof barely showing through.

勒 is lè, to rein a horse in, and not lēi, to pull something tight; the 廣韻 gives 盧則切, which is the literary reading. 幾椽 counts a house by its roof-beams, an old shorthand for a modest dwelling — the English equivalent would be reckoning a cottage in chimneys.

Pilgrim pointed off that way and said, "The folk over there must surely run a ferry."

Both 那 are nà, that: Wukong is pointing, so neither can be the question word nǎ. 擺渡 is to work a ferry crossing.

Tripitaka said, "I too saw it looked so over there, but as I made out no boat I did not venture to speak."

A small exchange that tells you a great deal. The master had reached the same conclusion and kept it to himself for want of a visible boat. 似 is sì.

Eight Rules swung down the luggage and bawled out at the top of his voice, "Ferryman! Bring the boat over!"

旋下 is to swing a shoulder-load down in one motion. Set it against the sentence before: where Tripitaka would not venture to speak, Bajie drops the luggage and bellows across the water.

After several such calls, out from within the willow shade there came creaking and squeaking a single boat, and before long it drew close to this bank.

咿咿啞啞 imitates oarlocks working, and sound-words of this kind keep their ordinary readings, since no dictionary records anything special for them. 船兒 takes the little suffix er — a boat, a small one. 相 in 相近 is xiāng.

Master and disciples looked the boat over carefully, and it was truly a case of:

真個是 — it was truly a case of — is one of the half-dozen stock phrases this novel uses to announce that verse is about to start. What follows is a description of a working boat. In the prose lead, 仔 is zǐ in 仔細, carefully, not the zǎi of a young animal.

A short scull dividing the ripples; a light oar riding the swell.

The piece opens in strict four-and-four balance. 棹 and 橈 are both oars — the first the longer sweep, the second the lighter blade — so the couplet names one action twice over, which is exactly what this kind of parallel verse is for.

The deck-house gay with painted lacquer; the hull-boards flush across a level hold.

橄 is what the 世德堂本 prints and what is shown here. Everywhere else the character belongs to 橄欖, the olive; using it for part of a boat is peculiar to this text. 艎 is a river craft of the 艅艎 sort.

At the bow, iron cable coiled in its nest; astern, the rudder-house standing clear.

盤窩 describes rope stowed in a coil, the way a cable is faked down on a deck. The couplet moves from bow to stern and finishes an inventory that has now covered oars, deck-house, hull, bow and stern.

Though this be a passage on a single reed, it yields nothing to crossing lake or riding sea.

一葦之航 is a double allusion, and both halves are about crossing water as an image of crossing over spiritually. It reaches back to the 河廣 poem in the 衛風 section of the 詩經 — who calls the river wide, when a single reed will cross it? — and forward to the Chan legend of Bodhidharma crossing the Yangtze standing on a reed. Two of the most dignified crossings in the tradition, brought to bear on a village ferry.

Though it want brocade hawser and ivory mast, it has in truth pine bollard and cassia oar.

縱…實有 concedes a point and then makes up for it, and that figure governs the whole second half of the poem. 錦纜牙檣 — brocade hawser, ivory mast — is the furniture of an imperial pleasure-barge; 松樁桂楫 puts honest timber in its place.

No match, to be sure, for a divine ship of ten thousand miles, yet it will truly ferry one river's width.

固不如…真可 repeats the concession of the couplet before it, and now the poem's argument is out in the open: this boat is to be judged by whether it is enough, not by whether it is grand. 萬里 counts in lǐ, the Chinese road-measure of roughly a third of a mile, and ten thousand of them is a stock way of saying a very long way rather than a figure anyone is meant to add up.

Coming and going, only between the two banks; entering and leaving, never far from the ancient ford.

The closing couplet shrinks the boat's whole world to a shuttle between two points. 古渡口 gives the crossing an age that the pilgrims have as yet no reason to find ominous.