城垣影影 Walls Faint on the Horizon
四眾行夠多時，又見城垣影影。長老舉鞭遙指叫：「悟空，你看那裡又有一座城池，卻不知是甚去處？」行者道：「你我俱未曾到，何以知之？且行至邊前問人。」四众行够多时，又见城垣影影。长老举鞭遥指叫：「悟空，你看那里又有一座城池，却不知是甚去处？」行者道：「你我俱未曾到，何以知之？且行至边前问人。」
逐句解 Line by line
The four of them had travelled a good while when city walls came dimly into sight.
影影 is a doubled character for shadow, used adverbially: dimly, indistinctly, the way a wall looks from a long way off in autumn haze. Chinese does a great deal of this — repeat a noun and it becomes a manner. 城垣 is the rampart itself rather than the settlement, so what they see first is the defence, not the town.
The elder raised his whip, pointed into the distance and called, "Wukong, look there — another walled city. But what place can it be?"
Tripitaka pointing at a distant city and asking what it is has happened so often by now that it is nearly a refrain. 城池 is wall-and-moat, the standard word for a proper city, and the moat is half the definition. 甚 is shén here, the question word what, rather than the shèn that means very — the character does both jobs and the sentence decides which.
Pilgrim said, "Neither you nor I has ever been here. How should I know?
A flat and slightly weary answer. 何以知之 is a formal classical turn — by what means would one know it — and Pilgrim slips into book language for one clause, which makes the reply sound like a rebuke delivered in a schoolmaster's voice.
Let us go on to the outskirts and ask someone."
The practical answer, and it is worth noticing that it is Wukong who gives it. For all his fire-eyes and his cloud-somersault, the method he proposes for finding out where they are is to walk up to a local and ask.
This is the novel's standard opening move for a new kingdom: walls appear, Tripitaka asks what they are, someone explains. It happens perhaps a dozen times in the book and the variation is always in who does the explaining.
Pilgrim's reply is more interesting than it looks. He can see a thousand miles, fly to heaven and back before breakfast, and interrogate the local earth god at will, and he does none of it. He suggests asking a person.
That restraint sets the tone for the whole Yuhua episode, which is one of the very few stretches of the journey with no monster in it at all until the very last page. What the pilgrims are about to walk into is a functioning town with a working government, and the story treats it accordingly.