但見好山 A Fine Mountain
卻說那孫大聖觔斗雲起，少頃間，見一座山頭阻住雲角。即按雲光，睜睛看處，好山！但見那：却说那孙大圣觔斗云起，少顷间，见一座山头阻住云角。即按云光，睁睛看处，好山！但见那：
逐句解 Line by line
Now the Great Sage Sun rose on his cloud-somersault, and in a short while saw a mountain-head blocking the corner of his cloud.
觔斗 takes 斗 as *dǒu*, the measure-graph, never *dòu* — the standing corpus ruling. 阻住雲角 gives the mountain the initiative: it stops the cloud, rather than the rider choosing to descend.
He pressed down the cloud-glow at once and opened his eyes to look. A fine mountain! And this is what he saw:
A J4 hand-join: the bare interjection 好山！ carries its own terminal and is joined forward to the 但見那： tag on the same source line, exactly as 好砂！ was joined at chapter fifty-two.
Secluded flowers spreading brocade; wild grasses laying down indigo.
鋪 is the verb *pū*, to spread out, not the *pù* of a shop-front. The opening couplet renders the mountain as textile — brocade and dye — which is the figure the whole rhapsody will keep returning to.
Ravine waters falling linked together; brook-clouds idle all alike.
相 is adverbial *xiāng*. 一樣閑 predicates idleness of the clouds as a shared property — they are not merely similar but similarly unoccupied.
Fold upon fold of valleys, the creepers thick; far and far the peaks, the trees luxuriant.
Both 重 are *chóng*, layered, and take positional fixspecs. 重重 and 遠遠 balance depth against distance, and the couplet expands from four graphs to seven, the rhapsody's characteristic widening.
Birds calling, wild geese passing; deer drinking, gibbons climbing.
Four verbs in eight graphs, one creature to each. The line is the rhapsody's shortest and its only wholly animate one.
Kingfisher ridges like a folding screen; blue cliffs like a coiled chignon.
岱 properly names Mount Tai and is used here for a ridge generally. 髻鬟 — the looped coil of a woman's dressed hair — is a conventional figure for rounded peaks, and in this chapter's context it is not an idle one. 似 is *sì*.
Rolling dust could truly never reach here; the trickling springs and rocks one never tires to watch.
塵埃 is the dust of the world in its figurative sense — the couplet is claiming seclusion, not cleanliness. 難 is *nán*, 石 is *shí*, 看 is *kàn*.
Ever one sees the immortals' boys going out to gather herbs; often one meets a woodcutter coming back under his load of faggots.
還 is *huán*, to return, not *hái*. 樵子 takes the suffix *zi*. The couplet populates the mountain with exactly the two figures a Daoist landscape requires, and both are engaged in errands rather than in contemplation.
Truly it yields nothing to the prospect of Mount Tiantai, and surpasses the three peaks of Mount Hua in the west.
華 is *huá*. The closing couplet ranks the mountain by comparison with two famous holy sites — Tiantai, the seat of the Tiantai school, and Hua, the Daoist western marchmount. 不亞…勝似 is the same concessive-then-surpassing figure the ferry rhapsody used.
The chapter's fourth rhapsody is a mountain-description, the most conventional of all the novel's set-piece forms, and it is executed with unusual metrical variety: four graphs, then five, then seven, then four again, then five, then seven twice over. The expansions and contractions are deliberate, and the shortest line — birds, geese, deer, gibbons — sits at the exact centre.
The governing figure is textile. Flowers spread brocade, grasses lay down indigo, ridges stand like a folding screen, cliffs coil like dressed hair. A landscape rendered as furnishing and adornment is a commonplace of the form, but the hair-simile is worth pausing over here: 髻鬟 is specifically a woman's coiffure, and the mountain being described stands in the Women's Country, thirty li from a village where two men are pregnant. The novel does not press the connection.
The closing couplet does what such rhapsodies almost always do, which is to certify the scene by comparison. Mount Tiantai and Mount Hua are named not as descriptions but as benchmarks — one Buddhist, one Daoist — and the mountain is declared equal to the first and superior to the second. Since the mountain in question houses a Daoist who is extorting villagers, the ranking has a slight edge to it.
It is worth registering how the passage arrives. Wukong has been sent for medicine and is thirty li into a thirty-li errand; the mountain stops his cloud and the narrative stops with it, for ninety-two graphs of scenery. This is the novel's settled rhythm — urgency suspended for description — and the suspension is not carelessness. The pilgrimage is made of such intervals, and the ordeals are what punctuate them.