Master and disciples lodged by night and set out at dawn, and when another six or seven days had passed they suddenly saw a range of high towers and several tiers of soaring pavilions.

⚠ 夜宿曉行 — lodged by night, travelled at dawn. This is the whole fourteen-year journey compressed into four characters, and it is worth knowing that the novel uses this exact phrase only twice: here, and in Chapter 14, a few pages after Monkey came out from under his mountain and the walking began. The first leg and the last leg, and nothing in between. 六七日, six or seven days — the book has stopped counting precisely, which after a hundred chapters of exact tallies is its own kind of signal. 忽見, suddenly they saw, is the novel's standard way of putting something in the road. Usually what is suddenly seen is a mountain with a cave in it.

And truly it was:

The cue. 真個是 announces a set-piece, and what follows is the chapter's first — eight lines describing a building. This is one of the four announcements in the chapter that a reader can spot coming. Three others arrive with no set phrase at all, just a name and a colon, and one of them is only forty characters away.

A hundred chǐ thrusting at the sky, / rearing to the River of Heaven, riding upon air.

⚠ 百尺 — a hundred chǐ. The chǐ is the Chinese foot, and it is left in Chinese here rather than turned into English feet, because a Ming chǐ was about a third of a metre and swapping in a different unit would quietly change the building. A hundred of them is roughly thirty metres — a ten-storey tower. ⚠ 聳漢 hides a small trap. That second character is the one that names the Han dynasty and the Chinese people, and here it means neither: it is the sky-river, the Milky Way, from the old name for it. The tower reaches up to the galaxy.

Bow the head, and watch the sun go down; / put out the hand, and pick the flying stars.

The oldest way in Chinese verse to say a building is tall: describe what you could do from the top of it. You look down at the sunset, and you reach out and take a star the way you would take fruit off a branch. 低頭, bowing the head, is going to come straight back. Thirty characters from here Tripitaka raises his head to look at a boy in a gateway, and the book uses the matching word for it.

Wide-flung casements and galleries swallow all space and time; / craggy ridgepoles and eaves come up against the screen of cloud.

⚠ 豁達 is huò dá, wide open and free of obstruction. The first character has another life in a phrase about staking everything on one throw, where it is read huō, and that is the reading a dictionary reaches for first — but a window is not staking anything. It appears once in the whole novel, right here. 宇宙 is usually translated universe, and the two characters are worth separating: the first is roof and eaves, everywhere in space; the second is past and future, everywhere in time. The windows swallow both. It turns up three times in this chapter and again in the very next line.

The yellow crane brings word, and the autumn trees grow old; / the painted luan carries letters, and the evening wind is clear.

Cranes and phoenixes are the post office of the immortals. The luán is a bird of the phoenix family, and both of these are standard carriers of messages between the heavens and the earth — the sort of detail a first reader took as read, the way we take a stamp. The second half of each line does something the first half does not: the letters arrive, and then the trees go on ageing and the wind goes on blowing. Post comes and time passes anyway.

This, then, is a palace of spirits and a gate-tower of treasure, / a lodge of fine jade and a courtyard of pearl.

Four two-word pictures in a row, each of them a building material joined to a building. 琳 is a fine dark jade — the character occurs once in the whole novel, and it is here. Watch the line lengths across this set-piece and you will see them refuse to settle: four and four, then five and five, then seven and seven twice over, and now seven against four. That unevenness is the form working as intended. A regular poem holds one measure; a piece like this changes measure as it goes, which is why the reader's edition marks it with a different label from a poem.

In the hall of truth they discourse upon the Way; / through all space and time they hand the scriptures down.

⚠ Read the two halves against each other and something odd shows up. 談道 is to discourse upon the Way — the Daoist word. 傳經 is to hand down the scriptures — the Buddhist one. One line, both houses. That is not carelessness. The building the pilgrims are looking at is a Daoist abbey, and it is the last stop before the Buddha's own mountain. Hold that thought: the man who comes out of it is going to insist on walking them up the road himself.

The flowers turn to the spring and are fair; / the pines stand out the rain and come away green.

After four lines of jade and pearl and galaxies, two lines about a garden. The measure drops back to five characters a side and the vocabulary drops back to flowers, pine, spring, rain. The pairing is exact: flowers meet the season and are lovely for it, pines meet the weather and are greener for it. One thrives on ease, one on being rained on. Given who is about to be told to walk instead of ride, it is a well-placed couplet.

Purple fungus and the fruit of the immortals put out their best year upon year; / the cinnabar phoenix wheels in stately measure, and ten thousand things feel its power.

⚠ 紫芝, the purple zhī, is the bracket fungus that grows on old trees and is dried hard as wood. Daoist medicine treated it as a drug of long life, and it is still sold that way today under the name lingzhi. In a garden like this it is not decoration; it is the pharmacy. 年年 — year after year — is the fourth doubled word in this passage, after house-by-house and door-by-door a moment ago. The set-piece keeps reaching for the same device to say without exception. The closing line is deliberately hard to pin down: the red phoenix flies in measured dignity, and ten thousand somethings answer to it. The book does not say what the ten thousand are, and the vagueness is the effect.

Tripitaka lifted his whip, pointed away into the distance and said, "Wukong — what a fine place that is!"

Eight lines of jade and galaxies, and then the man on the horse says what a fine place. The deflation is the book's own. ⚠ He points with his whip, which means he is still holding it, which means he is still mounted. Nobody has said so. Monkey is about to make the whole of his next speech out of that one unstated fact. 好去處 — a fine place to go. The middle character is the one that also means to handle or deal with a matter; here it is simply a place, and the same word runs through this whole scene four times.