"They have this same custom here as well." Pilgrim said, "Shall we go and have a look at it too?"

Pilgrim suggests it. The chapter is careful about this: the disaster is not something that befalls them, it is something they walk into, and it is the clever one who proposes the walk.

也去看看 — go and have a look, with the verb doubled. Doubling a verb in Chinese makes it casual, a quick look rather than an expedition. Nothing could be less momentous.

Tripitaka said, "It will not do, it will not do. Your clothes and mine are not suitable, and there may be suspicion." Pilgrim said, "Master, have you forgotten what the old monk of the Gold-Spread Monastery of the Friendless said?"

Tripitaka is right, for the wrong reason. He is worried about looking out of place in a crowd; the actual danger is that the crowd is a trap.

嫌疑 — suspicion, the appearance of impropriety. He is being careful, and it is exactly the wrong caution.

And then Pilgrim plays the card the old monk gave him. The whole reason they know about the princess is that a hundred-and-five-year-old abbot broke a year's silence, and Pilgrim has been carrying it since dawn.

"First, to look at the coloured tower; second, to tell the true from the false. With all this rush and bustle, that emperor is bound to be listening to his daughter's happy news — how would he be sitting in court attending to business? Let us just go and come back."

一則去看彩樓，二則去辨真假 — first this, second that. Pilgrim gives his reasons in the same two-part frame the old monk used at the end of his confession, which is a quiet way of showing whose argument he is repeating.

辨真假 — tell the true from the false. That is the old monk's request exactly, and it is the second time in four hundred characters that Pilgrim has restated the job as a matter of telling things apart rather than fighting them.

⚠ 那裡視朝理事 — how would he be sitting in court? This is the question form, nǎ, not the everyday word for that place, and twenty-seven characters later the same two characters are a plain location. The chapter puts its two readings of this pair closer together than anywhere else.

Tripitaka, hearing this, did indeed go along with Pilgrim, and saw that people of every sort were there watching the ball-throwing. Ah! Who was to know that this going would turn out to be:

⚠ 俱在那裡看打繡毬 — were all there watching. Here the same two characters are a plain location, nà, twenty-seven characters after the question form. This one site is the only plain location among the chapter's six of them, and a rule applied to the phrase rather than to the sentence would get it wrong.

呀 — Ah! One character, standing alone as its own sentence, and the narrator stepping in front of the story to wince.

那知 — who was to know. ⚠ Also the question form, and nowhere near the usual place: this is the third of the chapter's question sites that sit outside the frame everybody sweeps.

"The old fisherman has cast down his hook and line; and from today he will pull up trouble."

漁翁 — the old fisherman. The image is of somebody else's patience: a line already in the water, a hook already baited, and a fish that has no idea it is fishing weather.

是非 — right and wrong, and so by extension trouble, a quarrel, a mess. It is still the everyday Chinese word for the sort of trouble that comes of people taking sides.

Two lines of seven characters, and the chapter's last word before the break. The novel has told you the trap is a trap, told you who set it, and told you it has already sprung — and then stops.