Master and disciples went along enjoying the sights of the Double Fifth, idling away the festival at the year’s mid-heaven, when of a sudden they saw a high mountain barring the road.

端陽 is the Double Fifth, and 中天之節 calls it the festival at the year's high noon. 虛度 carries a faint reproach: the day is not kept but passed over.

The elder reined in his horse, turned his head and called out: “Wukong, there is a mountain ahead. I fear monsters may breed there again — we must be on our guard.”

勒馬 takes lè, the literary reading for reining a horse, not the everyday lēi of pulling a cord tight. Tripitaka's 恐又生妖怪, I fear monsters may breed there again, is the reflex of fifty-five chapters — and the danger in this one will not be a monster.

Pilgrim and the others said, “Set your heart at rest, Master. We have given our lives over in submission and come across in sincerity — what monsters have we to fear?”

皈命投誠 stacks two registers on top of each other: 皈命 is to take religious refuge with one's life, 投誠 is what a defeated commander does when he comes over to the winning side. 甚 here is the question word shén, what, not the intensifier shèn.

The elder was greatly pleased to hear it.

And here is 甚 again, two lines later, as the intensifier shèn — greatly pleased. The same character, the opposite reading, close enough together to make the difference visible.

He plied the whip and urged the fine horse on; he loosed the rein and hurried the dragon along.

A tight five-and-five parallel couplet sitting inside the prose. The 世德堂本 gives it no verse indent, so it is set here as prose. 蛟龍, flood-dragon, is not flattery applied to the white horse: the animal is a dragon prince of the Western Sea, and the poet is simply being accurate.

In a moment they had come up onto the cliff, and raising their heads to look about them, they saw that it was truly:

真個是, it was truly, is the second of the chapter's seven handover formulae, and it launches the longest description in the chapter. 觀看 puts two verbs of looking side by side, so 觀 is guān and 看 is kàn.

On the summit, pine and cypress meet the blue of the clouds; on the stone bluffs, briar and hazel hang with wild vine.

The description opens at the summit and works downward, which is the standard way to build a mountain piece — you are being walked down the slope, not shown a postcard.

Ten thousand zhàng of towering crag; a thousand tiers of sheer-cut rock.

A four-and-four couplet standing on its own between two seven-syllable lines. 丈 is left as zhàng rather than converted to English: one 丈 is ten 尺, roughly three metres. 萬丈, ten thousand of them, is the standard hyperbole for height and not a measurement anybody took.

Ten thousand zhàng of towering crag, and the peaks and ridges are steep; a thousand tiers of sheer-cut rock, and the gorge and cliff are deep.

The four-and-four couplet just given is now picked up word for word and stretched into a seven-and-seven. This doubling is a stock move in descriptive verse, and it is why the short couplet is kept as a unit of its own — you are meant to hear the echo.

Grey moss and green lichen spread over the shaded rock; ancient juniper and tall pagoda-tree knot into a great wood.

鋪 is a verb here, the moss spreading over the rock, so pū and not the noun pù of 鋪面, a shopfront. 檜 is guì, the juniper — not the huì of the notorious Song minister 秦檜.

Deep in the wood, listen to the hidden birds: their artful notes, clear and sweet, are truly fit to be sung of.

睍睆 is lifted straight out of the 凱風 ode in the 邶風 section of the 詩經, the Book of Songs, where it describes the note of an oriole. The best part of three thousand years old, and still the right word for a bird singing well. 睆 is read huǎn, not huàn.

In the gully the water runs as though pouring jade; beside the road the fallen flowers lie like heaped gold.

瀉玉, pouring jade, and 堆金, heaped gold, are a matched pair of mineral similes for running water and fallen blossom. Hold on to the gold: the chapter is about to put the real thing in front of the pilgrims, in the form of a demand.

The lie of the mountain is vicious, not to be walked: in ten paces there is not half a pace of level ground.

山勢惡 makes the ground itself malevolent — the lie of the mountain is vicious. The line sets up the ambush without naming it.

Fox and elk are met with two by two; white deer and dark gibbon come out in pairs to greet you.

The 世德堂本 prints 糜, which properly means gruel, where the animal wanted is 麋, the Père David's deer. The two sound identical at mí, and Ming printers swapped them freely. Encoded here as printed, and read on the character actually on the page.

Of a sudden a tiger’s roar is heard, to startle a man’s gall; the crane’s cry rings in the ear and pierces to the courts of Heaven.

The two cries split the vertical space the description has spent eighteen lines building: the tiger belongs to the ground, and the crane's call carries all the way to 天庭, the courts of Heaven.

Yellow plum and red apricot will serve for food; of the wild grasses and idle flowers, one does not know the names.

供 is gōng, to supply — the fruit will do for food — not the gòng of an offering laid on an altar. Watch that character: it comes back in a few passages with the other reading and does the chapter real damage. The closing 不識名 leaves the mountain finally unknown, which is how a piece like this is supposed to end.