On the other side Pilgrim gathered the Tang Monk up, Sha Monk got the baggage together, Bajie brought the horse round, they asked the Tang Monk to mount, and all of them took the high road.

著 is zhe, gathering him up and keeping hold. Five actions, one for each of them, in the order the party always re-forms: monk supported, luggage collected, horse fetched, master mounted, road taken. The chapter ends by putting the machine back together.

This is just the case:

The cue for the closing couplet. Four characters, and the novel steps out of the story to sum it.

Cut through the dodder and the vine, dry up the golden sea; open the jade lock and get out of the cage.

The couplet, and it is not the novel's own — it circulated as a saying of the Quanzhen patriarchs, and a Qing manual on the barriers of desire quotes these two lines entire and credits them to Qiu Chuji, because the novel itself was long credited to him. 絲蘿 is dodder and usnea, the twining plants that stand for marriage — the image goes back to the old poem where the dodder clings to the vine as a bride clings to a husband. So the first three characters sever a marriage. 乾 is gān, to dry — a verb standing where 出 stands in the line below. Chapter fifty-five closes on the same image and pairs the character there with a verb meaning to push, giving push-dry, drain — so it is a verb in both places. It is not the 乾 of the Book of Changes, which would be read qián. 金海 is the golden sea, the reservoir of vital essence that the fiend spent three chapters trying to draw on; drying it up ends the danger. 玉鎖 and 樊籠 are the jade lock and the cage, and both are standard for the entanglements a seeker has to get out of.