密密挨排 Ranked Close And Thick
原來那獬豸洞口把門的大小頭目，約摸有五百名，在那裡：原来那獬豸洞口把门的大小头目，约摸有五百名，在那里：
逐句解 Line by line
It turned out that the officers, great and small, who kept the mouth of the Xiezhi Cave — some five hundred of them — were there:
約摸 is roughly, by estimate — and the five hundred is Wukong's own count, made from a standstill. 那 falls twice and points both times. The announcement sits at the tail of the sentence and opens the set-piece from inside it.
Ranked in dense array; packed close in file.
Eight characters — two doubled adjectives and two verbs — and the next line takes each half and expands it. It is the same cascading build the mountain piece used earlier, where four verbs in eight characters were unpacked two to a line.
Ranked in dense array, they held shield and spear, and the sunlight came off them bright; packed close in file, they spread their banners, and the wind took them flapping and flashing.
The edition cuts these at a semicolon and they are read together here: eleven characters against eleven, each picking up its own doubled adjective from the line above, each running a verb, a two-character object and a four-character flourish. Neither outdoes the other. 干戈 is shield-and-spear, the standing pair for arms in general.
Tiger generals and bear commanders that could work transformations; leopard-headed captains and tiger-cub marshals showing their mettle.
將 is jiàng, a commander — the reading the sealed corpus uses at every one of its military occurrences. 彪 is a tiger cub, or a small striped tiger. Four ranks in fourteen characters, and every one of them is an animal holding an office.
The grey wolves were fierce enough; the otters and elephants braver still.
Ten characters, five and five — the shortest of the four regular couplets, though the opening pair is shorter still at four and four. 更 is gèng, still more, and it does the only comparing in the whole piece. Everything else is listed flat.
Cunning hares and knowing roebuck swung sword and halberd; long serpents and great pythons carried sabre and bow.
長 is cháng, long, describing the snake. The line arms the least martial animals in the muster — hares and roe deer — and hands them the heaviest weapons in it.
The gorillas understood the speech of men, and could lead a rank, pitch a camp and read the signal wind.
解 is jiě, to understand. 汛風 is wind read as a signal, the way a scout reads weather. This is the only line in the piece that credits an animal with language — and the next thing that happens in the chapter is a gorilla speaking.
Twelve kinds of animal in eighty-two characters, and every one of them is a soldier. Tigers, bears, leopards, wolves, otters, elephants, hares, roebuck, snakes, pythons, gorillas — this mountain is not a lair with monsters in it but a garrison with a table of ranks, and the piece spends its whole length on the organisation rather than on the menace.
It is built in two parts and only the second rhymes. The prologue ends on two sounds that agree with nothing; the four couplets that follow end on four, of which the last three share a rhyme. The verse settles into its scheme rather than opening with one — which is a way of moving from a general impression into a specific inventory.
And the last line is a plant. Gorillas understand human speech: a detail with no business in a description of banners and weapons, dropped in as the final item of a list. Five segments later a gorilla calls Wukong by name.