The two of them came back to the road in high spirits — and there was Tripitaka face down on the ground, fallen in the dust; the white horse loose from its halter, neighing long and plunging about by the roadside; and the baggage-load nowhere to be seen.

One sweep of the eye takes in the wreck. Three things hang off a single 只見 -- master, horse, baggage -- and the sentence does not stop between them. 長嘶 takes 長 at cháng, a long-drawn neigh; this is the second of the chapter's four such readings, against sixteen where the same character means "elder" and reads zhǎng. 行李擔 takes 擔 at dàn, the load as a thing. 倒在塵埃 is the toppling dǎo. One trap here: 行李 reads xíng, as it does everywhere, but inside the longer run 跑跳行李擔 an automatic reading breaks the phrase up and produces háng instead. It is the only place in the chapter where that happens to any of the fifty-four appearances of 行, and it is very easy to miss.

Bajie was thrown into a panic, stamping his feet and beating his breast, and bawled out: “No need to say it, no need to say it! This will be the remnant of that gang Sun Pilgrim drove off. They have come here and beaten the master to death and carried off the baggage.”

Bajie's diagnosis is wrong and completely reasonable. 慌得 takes 得 as the link hanging a consequence off the verb, de. 餘黨 -- the surviving remnant of a gang -- points straight back at the bandits of the previous chapter, who had every motive and are exactly the sort of people who take baggage.

Sha Monk said: “Go and make the horse fast first!”

The practical instinct, in the middle of a catastrophe: before you grieve, secure the animal.

And he could only cry: “What are we to do? What are we to do?

He can manage three characters, and then says them twice.

“This is what is meant by giving up halfway and stopping in mid-course.”

半途而廢 and 中道而止 are two classical four-character formulas for abandoning something unfinished, set side by side. The first is still in daily use in Chinese for anyone who gives up half way. 中道 takes 中 at zhōng. Sha Monk reaches for literary language at the worst moment of the chapter, which is very much like him.

He called out once: “Master.”

Five characters, and one of them is the whole segment. He calls out once: master.

His eyes streamed and he wept with a breaking heart.

滿眼拋珠 -- casting pearls from brimming eyes -- is a set figure for weeping, and the novel uses it here entirely straight.

Bajie said: “Brother, leave off weeping. Things have come to this, and we had best say no more about fetching scriptures.

And Bajie starts winding up the pilgrimage. 兄弟 keeps both syllables at full weight, as it does throughout this corpus.

“You keep watch over the master's remains, and let me ride the horse to whatever prefecture or department or county, village or market town there may be, and sell it for a few taels of silver, and buy a coffin, and bury the master; and then the two of us will each go our own way and break up the company.”

The plan is a horse, a coffin, and goodbye. 那個府州縣鄉村店集 is the whichever-there-may-be 那, nǎ -- the reading this corpus has settled for that construction, not the pointing nà. 散夥 takes 散 as the verb "to break up", sàn. 兩 in 幾兩銀子 is the weight, and it is rendered "taels" because English borrowed a name for this particular Chinese unit; where English has no such name -- 寸 earlier in the chapter -- the Chinese word is kept instead.