This short quatrain is a hinge of a different kind from the chapter's opening passage: not a plot hinge but a temporal one. Between the farewell at Wūjī's border and the sighting of the mountain that will house the Red Boy, half a month of travel is compressed into four lines of conventional autumn imagery — withering leaves, ripening grain, blossoming ridge-plums, wind-stirred bamboo. Nothing in the verse itself is ominous; its function is pacing, the kind of brief seasonal tableau that recurs throughout the novel to mark the passage of uneventful road between one adventure and the next.

Read against the chapter title, though, the quatrain's very placidity is doing quiet work. 風搖山竹動寒聲, "the wind shakes the mountain bamboo, stirring its cold-weather sound," is the last wholly untroubled image before the narrative's tone shifts: the next block introduces a mountain 真個是摩天礙日, "truly one that scrapes Heaven and blocks the sun," and from there the descriptive register turns from lyric to menacing. The autumn couplet is the calm the reader is meant to register as a calm, precisely so that the change in weather — literal and dramatic both — will register as a change.