The closing formula is fixed in shape and slightly variable in wording, and this chapter takes a third form of the same hook. What follows it, on the evidence of the couplet at the head of the next chapter, is a false Thunderclap Monastery and a much older kind of trouble.

It is worth pausing on what has just ended. This is the least martial chapter in a long stretch of the novel and the most formally demanding one: six poems answering on the same five rhyme words, two linked-verse sequences, a sermon that turns into verse without announcing it, and a sustained argument about whether the pilgrimage was ever necessary. Nobody is defeated in combat. The whole company is simply dug up.