The Great Sage, in haste, sprang up on his somersault cloud, rose into mid-air, and smelling that rank wind on the air, went straight off after it to the northeast.

The pursuit begins with a nose rather than an eye. 腥風 is the fishy, rank smell that always marks a demon in this novel, and Pilgrim is tracking it through the sky. A reading: 斗 in 觔斗雲 is dǒu, the somersault — the corpus seals it so at 觔斗雲 — and not the dòu of fighting, which is a different graph altogether.

He pursued until daybreak, when all at once the wind died away.

倏爾 — all at once, in a flash. The trail simply stops, which tells Pilgrim he has arrived rather than lost it.

He saw a great mountain, exceedingly steep and truly craggy — a fine mountain:

The cue for the batch's one rhapsody. A reading: 著 in 著實 is zhuó, the literary reading, in a set phrase meaning "truly, downright" — not the zhe that marks a continuing action, which is what this graph does almost everywhere else in the chapter.

Fold upon fold of gullies; winding and winding, the springs at their source.

The mountain rhapsody opens on the ground rather than the skyline. 重 is chóng here, layered — not zhòng, heavy, which is the same graph and the reading the bare machinery reaches for.

Vines and creepers hang from the sheer cliffs; pine and cypress stand erect on the bare rock.

虛巖 is bare, unsheltered rock — nothing growing on it but what has forced its way in. The couplet pairs what hangs down against what stands up.

Cranes cry in the morning mist; wild geese call between the dawn clouds.

唳 is the particular word for the cry of a crane or a goose. This is the batch's first daylight after a night of lanterns, and the poem notices the change: mist, dawn cloud, birds.

Towering and jutting, the peaks ranked like halberds; abrupt and glittering, the stones laid up like slabs.

Four doubled sound-words in fourteen graphs. Chinese verse piles up repeated syllables where English reaches for adjectives, and the effect here is closer to a drumroll than to a description.

The summit rises ten thousand fathoms; the steep ridges fold in a thousand bends.

A 仞 is an old measure of about eight chǐ, so 萬仞 simply means unimaginably high. Nobody is counting.

Wild flowers and fine trees know that spring has come; cuckoo and oriole answer the season's beauty.

A reading: 應 is yìng, to answer or match — the birds are responding to the season — not yīng, the modal "ought." 杜宇 is the cuckoo, named for a legendary king of Shu whose soul was said to have become one, which is why its call is always melancholy in Chinese verse. And the season is the same first month the lanterns were lit in.

It can be lofty and splendid, and truly precipitous — grotesque, rugged, perilous and hard besides.

The line shifts from picture to verdict. 險又艱 — dangerous and difficult — is the poem admitting what the scenery is for. Pilgrim has to get into this place.

One lingers a long while and does not speak; one hears only tigers and leopards snoring aloud.

The best line in the rhapsody, and it works by subtraction. 人不語 — nobody talks — and then the only sound in the mountain is big cats asleep. 鼾 is snoring, which makes the predators domestic and the silence worse.

Fragrant river-deer and white stags come and go at will; the jade hare and the grey wolf depart and return again.

A reading that matters: 還 is huán here, to return — the natural partner of 去, to depart — and not hái, the adverb "still." The 玉兔 is the hare on the moon, so the line is doing double duty: real animals in a real mountain, and the moon setting as the sun comes up.

Deep in the ravine the water runs a thousand thousand lǐ; the eddying rapids beat on the rocks with a rushing and a murmuring.

The rhapsody closes on running water, and on one more doubled sound-word. 潺潺 is the noise a stream makes over stones — the same word the chapter used of the waterfall in its own first chapter, a very long way back.