骷髏若嶺 The Bone Yard At The Gate
卻說孫大聖進於洞口，兩邊觀看。只見：却说孙大圣进于洞口，两边观看。只见：
逐句解 Line by line
Now the Great Sage Sun stepped inside the cave mouth and looked to either side.
The chapter picks up mid-stride. Wukong has just talked his way past the outer guard wearing a dead scout's face, and the narrator drops us at the threshold with him. 卻說 is the storyteller's hinge — roughly "now then, back to" — and it always signals a scene the audience has been waiting for.
And this is what he saw:
Two characters, and they do a lot of work. 只見 is the cue that a set-piece is coming: the prose stops and a 賦 takes over. Think of it as the camera slowing down.
Skulls piled like ridges, bare bones standing like a forest.
The rhapsody opens on its two biggest images and refuses to soften either. 骷髏 kū lóu is a skull stripped bare; 骸骨 hái gǔ the rest of the skeleton. Ridges and forest are the stock furniture of landscape poetry, which is the joke — this is a landscape, and it is made of people.
Human hair trodden into felt mats, human skin and flesh rotted down to muck and dust.
屣 xǐ is a slipper, and used as a verb it means to tread underfoot — the hair has been walked on until it matted. 氈片 zhān piàn is a sheet of felt, which is exactly what matted hair becomes. The second half answers the first character for character: hair to felt, skin to mud.
Human sinew wound round the trees, dried and scorched, glinting bright as silver.
乾 is gān, dry — not qián, the hexagram of Heaven. 康熙 keeps the two apart by rhyme spelling: 渠焉切, sounded 虔, for the hexagram, and 古寒切, sounded 干, for this one, glossed simply 燥也 — parched. The chapter's other 乾 readings follow the same rule the sealed corpus does — everything is gān unless it is 乾坤, heaven-and-earth. What lifts the line is 晃亮如銀: dried tendon really does go glassy and catch the light, and the poet has looked.
The last chapter ended with Wukong scattering the outer guard by inventing a giant who was grinding an iron pole to kill them all. It worked. This chapter opens with him walking through the gate they abandoned — and the first thing the book does is show him what the demons have actually been doing, with no comedy in it at all.
The rhapsody is built as strict parallel couplets, each half answering the other part for part. That formal tidiness is deliberate and it is doing something cruel: the more orderly the verse, the more the reader notices that the inventory it is keeping is an inventory of people. Skulls, then skeletons, then hair, then skin, then sinew — the poem works inward through a body the way a butcher would.
Journey to the West is often read as a comic novel, and for long stretches it is. Passages like this are the reason the comedy lands. The stakes are not notional. Something in this cave eats travellers, and the road Xuanzang is on runs straight through its front door.