千巖競秀 Crags and Canopy Pines
逐句解 Line by line
Jagged rocks, / pines like green parasols.
翠蓋 is literally a kingfisher-blue canopy, the sort carried over a dignitary. The pine is being paid a compliment.
Rough and broken ridge-paths, / abrupt and intricately wrought.
崎嶇 and 玲瓏 are each a pair of syllables that mean nothing apart — rough-and-broken, and finely-wrought. Setting them against each other makes the ridge harsh and delicate in one breath.
Sheer walls and hanging cliffs, steep; / creeper and grass and trees, rank with growth.
薜蘿 is the climbing fig and the dodder, the two plants a hermit's clothes are made of in poetry. Their presence signals that this is a mountain someone could withdraw to.
A thousand crags contend in beauty like halberds ranked for battle; / ten thousand gorges race their streams, and the far waves run high.
千巖競秀 is borrowed from a famous remark in the fifth-century collection Shìshuō Xīnyǔ about the scenery of Kuaiji, and it has been a set phrase for spectacular mountain country ever since. The novel drops it in the way an English writer might reach for "purple mountain majesties."
The second half of the mountain rhapsody turns from colour to shape, and the images get harder: rocks, cliffs, halberds, racing water. The mountain has stopped being pretty and started being difficult.
The halberd image is the one to watch. A thousand crags standing like weapons in a rack is a compliment to the scenery, but it is also a warning, and the verse ends with waves running high somewhere in the distance. Tripitaka is about to look at all this and think of home.