拖繩帶索 Trailing Rope And Cord
那兩個小妖得了命，負痛逃生，拖著鎖索，淬入水內。諕得那些黿鼉龜鱉，蝦蟹魚精，都來圍住問道：「你兩個為何拖繩帶索？」一個掩著耳，搖頭擺尾；一個侮著嘴，跌腳搥胸。都嚷嚷鬧鬧，徑上龍王宮殿：「報大王，禍事了。」那两个小妖得了命，负痛逃生，拖着锁索，淬入水内。諕得那些鼋鼍龟鳖，虾蟹鱼精，都来围住问道：「你两个为何拖绳带索？」一个掩着耳，摇头摆尾；一个侮着嘴，跌脚搥胸。都嚷嚷闹闹，径上龙王宫殿：「报大王，祸事了。」
逐句解 Line by line
The two lesser fiends, their lives granted them, bore their pain and fled for safety, dragging their chains behind them as they plunged into the water.
得了命 takes 得 at dé, the full verb: what is obtained is their lives, and 得 heads a predication of its own. 拖著 takes the durative 著 zhe. 淬 is properly to quench hot metal in water, and the novel borrows it for a body going under with the same suddenness. 那 is deictic, nà.
They so frightened the giant soft-shells and river alligators, the tortoises and terrapins, the shrimps and crabs and fish-sprites, that the whole company came crowding round to ask, "What are you two about, trailing rope and cord?"
諕 stands at xià by the corpus-wide ruling; pypinyin gives háo and is wrong at every site. 諕得 takes the linking 得 de, joining the verb to the clause that states its effect — the opposite frame from 得了命 in the segment before it, and the two stand sixteen graphs apart. 為何 keeps 為 at wèi, the purposive reading, against the copular wéi that 稱為 took earlier in this chapter.
The one clapped a hand over his ears, shaking his head and lashing his tail; the other clapped a hand over his mouth, stamping his feet and beating his breast.
The two members are rejoined here across the semicolon that divides them in the block: they are one sentence in strictly parallel halves with nothing escalating between them. Both 著 are the durative zhe and both specs are given by position. 侮 is the novel's regular orthography for the verb to cover with the hand — the sense now written 摀 — and it occurs with 著 in eight of the novel's chapters, while 掩著耳 occurs only here.
All of them clamouring and making an uproar, they went straight up to the Dragon King's palace hall: "Report to the Great King — disaster!"
嚷 stands at rǎng at both sites by the corpus-wide ruling, where pypinyin gives rāng for the first and a neutral rang for the second. 都 is dōu, the totalising adverb, its second occurrence in this passage. 了 is the sentence-final particle le, marking the disaster as newly come about rather than as finished.
The scene goes under the water and the register changes with it. What meets the two maimed fiends is a whole populace of shelled and clawed things, named in a four-graph run — giant soft-shells, river alligators, tortoises, terrapins — and then shrimps, crabs and fish-sprites after them. The dragon court has commons of its own, and the novel takes a moment to show them before it shows the throne.
The centre of the passage is a matched pair of gestures and repays reading slowly. One creature covers his ears; the other covers his mouth. The reason is in the passage before: one had his ears cut off, the other his lip cut away. The parallelism does the whole work of explanation, and neither the narrator nor the crowd around them says so aloud.
諕, the graph for being frightened out of one's wits, occurs four times in the chapter, twice of them in the stretch read here: once for the water-tribe, and again a hundred and eighty graphs later for the Dragon King himself, when the news reaches the throne. The fright travels upward through the court in the order of rank, and the same graph carries it at each stage.