漠漠濃雲 Dense Cloud and Black Mist
好雨：好雨：
逐句解 Line by line
A fine rain it was:
Two characters and a colon, and the storyteller hands over to verse. What follows is a a rhapsody — a long, unrhymed descriptive set piece in rhythmic prose — and the longest single stretch of verse in the chapter.
Dense cloud spread wide and grey; black mist hanging fine and thick.
The rhapsody opens on four doubled sound-words in a row, which is the form announcing itself. 漠漠 and 濛濛 both describe things too diffuse to have edges, and neither has an English word behind it — they are textures rendered as repetition.
Thunder-chariots rumbling and rolling; lightning flashing bright and sharp.
雷車, the thunder-chariot, is the vehicle the thunder gods were imagined to ride; the rumble of thunder is its wheels. The image is old enough that by this period it had become simply a word for thunder.
Wild wind rolling on and on; sudden rain running and gurgling.
淙淙 is the sound of water moving over stones, which is a curious choice for falling rain — the rhapsody has skipped ahead to the water already running on the ground.
Six doubled sound-words in three lines. The rhapsody is not describing the storm so much as making the noise of it, and Chinese verse has a whole apparatus for this that English can only gesture at.
Each pair works the same way: a character repeated to turn a thing into a texture. Cloud becomes cloudiness, thunder becomes rumbling, wind becomes rolling. After a chapter of exact figures — three years, ten zhàng, forty-two drops — the verse abandons counting entirely.