And this is how it was:

The cue, and the shortest one the chapter uses. 正是 is a set phrase and it appears twice in these pages; note that it is not the same phrase as the one with an extra character on the end, which announced the towers and the bathing poem.

Seen from afar it lies across the sky like a beam of jade; / seen from close at hand it cuts the water, one withered branch.

⚠ The whole verse is built on this one movement — far, then near — and the movement is a deflation. From a distance it is jade. Up close it is a dead stick. ⚠ 枯槎 — a withered branch, a dry snag of the kind that lodges in a river. The character for it occurs once in the whole novel. The poem has reached for the least impressive word available and put it where the rhyme falls. 遠看 and 近觀 are two different verbs for looking, matched across the couplet. Chinese verse pairs verbs like this as a matter of course, and the two here are exactly matched: one for looking from afar, one for looking from close to.

To bridge a river or span a sea would still be easier than this; / one log, one beam — how is a man to set his foot on it?

⚠ 獨木單梁 — one log, one beam. Four characters, and both halves say the same thing, which is how Chinese insists. ⚠ 蹅 — to tread, to set the foot down and put weight on it. It is a coarse, physical word, not a literary one, and the novel uses it four times. Dropping it into a poem about jade beams and rainbows is deliberate: the line changes register at the exact moment it asks how you would actually walk on the thing.

Ten thousand zhàng of rainbow lying flat, and its shadow with it; / a thousand xún of white silk reaching to the sky's edge.

⚠ Two measurements, and both are left in Chinese. The 丈 zhàng is about three metres; the 尋 xún is an old unit of roughly eight chǐ, originally the span of a man's outstretched arms — the same idea as the English fathom, and used the same way, for things too long to pace out. 白練 — white silk. A river or waterfall seen from above looks like a bolt of undyed silk laid out, and the comparison is old enough to be invisible to a Chinese reader. The bridge has now been a jade beam, a dead branch, a rainbow and a length of cloth in the space of four lines. None of them is a bridge.

Thin and slippery through and through, and hard past bearing to cross; / unless you are an immortal, treading the coloured clouds.

⚠ 除是神仙 — unless you are an immortal. And that is the poem's verdict, delivered as a condition: this is not passable by a person. ⚠ Which is exactly the objection Pigsy is about to make, and exactly the one Monkey has already ruled out. The Daoist said the cloud road was not for them. The poem says only cloud-treaders can cross. Between the two there is nothing left but the log. 十分 — ten parts out of ten, thoroughly. The same two characters meant something quite different in the last chapter, where Squire Kou was described as thoroughly rich.