梢子模樣 What Manner of Boatman
那船兒須臾頂岸，那梢子叫云：「過河的，這裡去。」三藏縱馬近前看處，那梢子怎生模樣：那船儿须臾顶岸，那梢子叫云：「过河的，这里去。」三藏纵马近前看处，那梢子怎生模样：
逐句解 Line by line
The boat touched the bank in a moment, and the boatman called out, "Those crossing the river — over here!"
梢子 is a boatman — the word is written 艄 elsewhere, and this text's spelling is kept. Nothing in the noun and nothing in the call gives away the speaker's sex, and the narrative is holding that back on purpose.
Tripitaka urged his horse up close and looked — and what manner of figure was this boatman?
怎生模樣 — what manner of figure was this? — is the standard formula announcing a description of a person, as against a place. The novel asks the question and then answers it in verse.
A kerchief of figured wool wrapped about the head; black silk shoes upon the feet.
The description starts at the head and works down, which is the conventional order. Nothing here yet tells a man from a woman.
On the body a wadded jacket of a hundred patches; at the waist a cloth sash of a thousand stitches.
百納 is printed for 百衲, the patchwork of a monk's or a pauper's garment, and the printed spelling is kept. 百 and 千 are a conventional pair, not counts — a hundred patches and a thousand stitches mean many. 絛 is tāo, a woven band.
Wrists rough-skinned, the sinews hard; eyes dulled, brows furrowed, the countenance worn away.
The couplet turns from clothing to body and records a working life. 衰 carries decline rather than simple age — worn away, not merely old.
A voice soft and fine as an oriole's warbling — yet seen close to, only an old woman.
裙釵 is skirt-and-hairpin, a stock way of saying woman, and it is held back to the last two characters of the whole description. 乃是 marks what follows as a correction: not what you took it for, but this.
This description is built as a delayed reveal, and the delay is the whole of its art. Four couplets take a body from head to foot — kerchief, shoes, jacket, sash, wrists, eyes, brows, face — and not one detail in the first three settles the question of sex. The clothes are workwear, the hands are a labourer's, the face is simply old. Only in the final two characters, 裙釵, does the picture resolve.
The pivot is placed in the last couplet with some cunning. The voice is heard before the person is seen clearly — soft and fine as an oriole — and then the ear's evidence is confirmed by the eye at close range. 乃是 does the work of a correction. The reader, who has been given a boatman for two sentences of prose and eight lines of verse, is corrected along with Tripitaka.
For a first-time reader the reveal is a minor curiosity. For anyone who knows what follows it is the chapter's first structural signal: the pilgrims have crossed into a country where every inhabitant is a woman, and the ferry is the border. The novel does not announce this. It simply stops supplying men, beginning here, and waits for Wukong to ask about it in the next passage.