遮天蔽日 It Blots Out Sky And Sun
孫大聖正自恐懼，又見那山中迸出一道沙來。好沙，真個是遮天蔽日！你看：孙大圣正自恐惧，又见那山中迸出一道沙来。好沙，真个是遮天蔽日！你看：
逐句解 Line by line
The Great Sage Sun was still in his alarm when he saw a spout of sand come bursting out of that mountain.
正自 holds him in the state the previous line left him in: the alarm has not been resolved, only added to. 迸 is to burst out under pressure — the same verb the smoke used a moment ago when the firelight came out of the mountain.
Fine sand it was, and truly it screened the sky and shut out the sun.
真個是 is elsewhere in this book one of the set phrases that stands alone and opens a poem, and it is not doing that here: no colon, no line break, and a full statement follows it. Compare 好煙！ a few passages back, which was two characters with nothing after them and did open one. The tag proper is the two characters in the next segment.
Look:
Two characters and a colon, standing alone. An announcement like this is never joined to the poem it introduces and never separated from it either — it sits in its own line, like a stage direction.
Scattering and swirling out to the sky's edge; murky and thick, it covered the whole earth over.
Fourteen characters and eight of them are doubled: 紛紛, 絯絯, 鄧鄧, 渾渾 — four pairs in one line, and the remaining three lines of the quatrain have not one between them. 絯 is here purely for its sound. The 1716 dictionary gives it two readings, one glossed as binding and one as thick silk, and neither has anything to do with blown sand; the main reading is taken and the meaning is left to the noise.
Fine dust wherever it went confounded men's eyes; coarse ash filled the valleys, rolling like sesame seed.
The quatrain rhymes at all four line-ends — zhē, má, jiā, huā — and the first line joins the scheme rather than standing outside it. All four belonged to one rhyme group in the old books. The modern readings have since parted company, three keeping -a and one sliding to -e, so this rhymes rather better in the fourteenth century than it does now.
Immortals' boys out gathering simples lost their companions; woodcutters at their firewood had no way of finding home.
The couplet leaves the sand for a moment and gives it two victims instead, one from each side of the mountain's population. 仙僮 and 樵子 are the standing pair for who lives on a mountain in this literature — the boy who belongs to its holiness, and the man who works it for firewood.
Though a man held a bright pearl in his hand and it shone, in a moment he would be so scoured that his eyes swam.
得 is the light de, hooking 刮 to what the scouring produced. The quatrain ends on a hypothetical rather than a scene, and the hypothetical is a light source that cannot help: hold a shining pearl in your hand and it will still not let you see. The sand defeats sight even where there is something to see by.
The chapter's title promises smoke, sand and fire, and with the sand the set is complete. They did not arrive in that order — the fire came first, the smoke fifteen characters later, and the sand a hundred and eight after that. The title lists them for the sound of the line; the narrative releases them in the order that escalates.
The poem spends all its doubled words in one place. The first line is half built of them and the other three have none, so the piece opens on pure texture and then turns to consequence: dust in the eyes, ash in the valley, a lost boy, a lost woodcutter, a pearl that gives no help.
What the sand attacks is specifically sight. Every image in the four lines is about seeing or failing to see, and the last makes the point exactly — light is no use, because the problem was never darkness. This is the third weapon and the first one aimed at a faculty rather than a body.