光景如梭 Deep Autumn Comes On
此時光景如梭，又值深秋之候，但見：此时光景如梭，又值深秋之候，但见：
逐句解 Line by line
By now the days were flying like a shuttle, and it had come round to deep autumn. This is what they saw:
光景如梭 — the light and shade going like a weaver's shuttle — is the standard Chinese image for time passing quickly, and it is still in daily use. 但見, and this is what was seen, is the storyteller's cue that a set piece is coming: the prose stops and a song begins. What follows is a lyric in uneven measures rather than a regular poem, which is why its lines run three, four, five and seven characters long instead of keeping to one width.
The watermarks draw back; the mountains show their bones.
The lyric opens with two three-character strokes, and both are about subtraction. 水痕收 is the summer high-water line retreating as the rivers drop. 山骨, mountain-bones, is the rock showing through once the green has gone — the same metaphor English reaches for when it calls a winter landscape bare-boned.
Red leaves whirl down; the season of yellow flowers.
Red against yellow, leaves against flowers. 黃花, yellow flowers, is chrysanthemums — so fixed an association in Chinese poetry that the flower barely needs naming, in the way that saying "the ninth month" once meant the same thing to any reader.
Frost and clear skies, and the nights feel long; the moon is white and drives straight through the window.
長 is cháng here, long, not the zhǎng of growing or of an elder — the same character carries both and the pairing with night settles it. 穿 and 透 are stacked to make the moonlight forceful rather than gentle: it pierces and it passes through. The nights are not merely longer; they are felt to be longer, which is what 覺 adds.
House upon house, hearth smoke and a long low sun; place upon place, lake light and cold water running.
Two doubled openings, 家家 and 處處, house-house and place-place, which is how Chinese verse says everywhere at once. 溜 is read here as it is in the compound for a swift current rather than as the everyday word for sliding, and it gives the cold water a rushing sound. The line is the first warm thing in the lyric: smoke means people are cooking.
Journeys in this novel are almost never described. The pilgrims walk for months and the text says so in four characters. When it does stop to describe, as here, the reason is usually that a new place is about to appear and the story needs a breath first.
The song is built out of pairs from the first line to the last: water against mountain, red against yellow, frost against moon, smoke against lake water. Nothing in it is unusual on its own, and the effect comes entirely from the pace of the pairing, which is why it works better sung than read.
Notice also that autumn is doing a job. The pilgrims left Fengxian in the middle of a rescue from drought, and the season that follows a broken drought is harvest — which is exactly what the town they are walking towards is about to be full of.