The Great Sage led the Tang monk and the rest, and at a slow and easy pace they climbed the Spirit Mountain.

⚠ 徐徐緩步 — a slow and easy pace. Four characters that would be unremarkable anywhere else in the book and are the whole point here. They are walking, and walking slowly, because an old Daoist told them a hundred characters ago that the cloud road is not for them. 引著 — leading, and going on leading. The character after the verb is the light one that marks something still happening, which is a different job from the two others it does in this chapter.

Not five or six lǐ along they came upon a run of living water, roaring and rushing, its waves rolling and its current flying, some eight or nine lǐ across, and not a footprint anywhere about it.

⚠ 活水 — living water, which is to say a river that moves, as against a pond. The book has crossed a great many rivers by now and calls this one by a word it has kept back. The measurements are in lǐ, the Chinese mile, about half a kilometre in the Ming. Five or six of them walked, eight or nine of them of water: they have gone less far than the river is wide. ⚠ 四無人跡 — not a footprint on any side. The last four characters are the ones to feel. Everywhere else in this chapter the road has been full of people at their practice. Here, at the crossing, nobody has walked at all.

Tripitaka took fright. "Wukong — this road has come out wrong. Can the Great Immortal have pointed us astray?"

⚠ 來得差了 — has come out wrong. The middle character is the light one that hands the sentence on to what follows, and this small frame occurs forty-one times across the novel with the light reading at every one. 敢莫 — can it be that. A Ming way of putting a worried guess, and Tripitaka's first thought at the water's edge is that somebody has made a mistake. It has not occurred to him that the road might be right and the crossing hard.

"The water is this wide and this violent, and there is no boat or oar in sight. How is it to be crossed?"

舟楫 — boat and oar, a bookish pair for the means of crossing water. Tripitaka is speaking formally even in a panic. ⚠ Note what he asks for, because he is about to be given exactly it and to like it no better. There is no boat in sight. There will be.

Monkey said with a laugh, "Nothing is wrong. Look over that way — is that not a great bridge?"

那壁廂 — over that way, on that side. A vernacular phrase for a direction, and one of the small usages that mark this novel's speech as spoken rather than written. ⚠ 一座大橋 — a great bridge. He is not lying and he is not quite telling the truth either. What is there is a bridge in the sense that a plank over a ditch is a bridge.

"You must go across by that bridge; only then do you win the true fruit."

⚠ 方成正果 — only then is the true fruit attained. 正果 is the standing Buddhist term for the goal of the whole practice, and the novel says it fifty-eight times in thirty-four chapters. Monkey has just made the bridge a condition of it. That is a large claim and he produces it casually, in the same breath as pointing. Nobody asks him how he knows.

The Elder and the others went closer and looked. At the bridge stood a board, and on the board were three characters: Cloud-Touching Crossing. It was, in fact, a bridge made of a single log.

⚠ The sentence is built to land in the last four characters, and the edition helps by putting the name in quotation marks. First a board, then a grand name, then 一根獨木橋 — one log. ⚠⚠ AND THE NAME IS A CALLBACK. 凌雲渡 is not new. Twenty-eight chapters ago Monkey sang his own praises in a poem about his somersault cloud, and one of the boasts was that a single leap of it carried him clean over this crossing. He has been here before, in the air, and told everyone so. Now he has to walk it. 獨木橋 occurs twice in the whole novel and both are here.