頂摩碧漢 A Peak That Rubs The Sky
不多時,早見一座大山,阻住雲腳。三人採住馬,都按定雲頭。見那山:不多时,早见一座大山,阻住云脚。三人采住马,都按定云头。见那山:
逐句解 Line by line
Before long a great mountain came in sight and blocked the feet of their clouds.
雲腳, the feet of the cloud, is the underside a rider stands on — a nice bit of technical vocabulary for a mode of travel this book takes entirely for granted.
The three of them took hold of the horse and all brought their clouds to a stop.
都 is dōu. They grab the horse first, which is what one does when landing with the luggage aboard.
They saw that mountain:
那 is nà. The last set-piece verse of the chapter, and the tag is never parted from it.
Its summit rubs the blue river of heaven, its peaks join the azure sky.
碧漢, the blue Han river, is the Milky Way — the same Silver River that appeared in the night poem at the very start of the chapter.
Round about, ten thousand thousand mingled trees; birds coming and going, chattering and squalling.
The doubled numbers and the doubled bird noise are both intensifiers rather than exact counts — this is a mountain described by piling on.
The chapter's last mountain poem begins, and it opens by reaching for the Milky Way — the same river of stars the night poem used on the first evening, when everything was quiet.
That is not accidental. This chapter opened with a peaceful night sky over a monastery and closes with a sinister one over a mountain, and it uses the same image for both.
The birds are worth a moment. Every other creature in this poem will turn out to be a predator; the birds are simply loud, which is the last ordinary thing in the landscape.