一座城池 A City Comes Into View
卻說三藏師徒四眾別樵子，下了隱霧山，奔上大路。行經數日，忽見一座城池相近。三藏道：「悟空，你看那前面城池，可是天竺國麼？」却说三藏师徒四众别樵子，下了隐雾山，奔上大路。行经数日，忽见一座城池相近。三藏道：「悟空，你看那前面城池，可是天竺国么？」
逐句解 Line by line
Now then: Tripitaka and his three disciples took their leave of the woodcutter, came down from Hidden Mist Mountain, and struck out along the high road.
卻說 is the storyteller's throat-clear — now then, picking up where we left off. The woodcutter and Hidden Mist Mountain are the tail end of the previous chapter's business, cleared away here in a single clause so the new story can start.
They travelled for some days, and then all at once a walled city stood close at hand.
城池 is literally wall-and-moat, the standard word for a proper city — the moat is half the definition. That detail is about to matter, because the very next exchange turns on whether paradise has walls.
Tripitaka said, "Wukong, look at that city ahead — could that be the country of India?"
Tripitaka's hopefulness is a running joke by this point in the novel: every large building might be journey's end. 天竺 is the old Chinese name for India, and the whole point of the pilgrimage is to reach it. He is right that they are close and wrong about essentially everything else, which Pilgrim is about to explain at some length.
After the cosmic overture, the story drops straight into the most ordinary travelling scene imaginable: four tired men on a road, seeing a town.
Tripitaka asking whether this is India already tells you a great deal about him. He has been walking for years and still cannot judge distance; he is a man of enormous spiritual seriousness and almost no practical sense. The novel finds this funny rather than contemptible, and so does Pilgrim, whose reply is patient in a way it would not have been a few dozen chapters earlier.