A stone bridge rearing high, and murmuring waters running out to meet a long stream; ancient trees ranged in ranks, and chattering hidden birds calling to the far peaks.

長 is cháng here, long — a long stream. Watch for it again in the very next passage, where the same character opens 長老 and says zhǎng, senior, the Elder. Long and elder share one written form and nothing else. 聒 is guō, not guā: 中原音韻 groups it with 括, which can only be kuò, and 洪武正韻 has it at 古活切 glossed 讙語, clamorous talk. Doubled, it is the racket of unseen birds.

Beyond the bridge, a few beams of thatched cottage, so clean and so elegant it might be an immortal's hermitage; and there besides a window of woven reeds, so white and so bright it shames a Daoist cloister.

Both halves double a pair of characters to make an impression rather than a statement — 清清雅雅 and 白白明明. English reaches for "so clean and so elegant"; Chinese just says the word twice. 欺 is doing real work: it means to bully or impose on, so the window does not merely match a cloister, it outshines one and puts it to shame.

And before the window, all at once, four lovely women — every one of them there embroidering phoenixes and tracing simurghs at their needlework.

刺鳳描鸞 — pricking phoenixes, drawing simurghs — is the standard four-character way of saying a woman is at fine embroidery. The birds are the conventional pattern. And the verb sitting under all of it is the one that matters: these four spin thread for a living, and what they spin it from is not silk off a worm.