As Yu Tsun himself describes the glum setting of his train trip:
There was hardly a soul on the platform. I went through the coaches; I remember a few farmers, a woman dressed in mourning, a young boy who was reading with fervor the Annals of Tacitus, a wounded and happy soldier.
The coaches jerked forward at last. A man whom I recognized ran in vain to the end of the platform. It was Captain Richard Madden. Shattered, trembling, shrank into the far corner of the seat, away from the dreaded window.
Moreover, Yu Tsun's final train ride toward killing and being killed is not even anything of a labyrinthine (or even mildly interesting) journey through the likes of gardens, or along forking paths. Instead, this is just a straight, direct, well-worn; non-ambiguous shot to another non-descript, poorly lighted train station replete with more dim lighting and plenty of shadows [the word "shadows" being meant here by Borges, most likely as yet...
Shadows of both kinds await Yu Tsun at the grim-sounding Ashgrove station.
Before then, though, while still en route to Ashgrove, "The train ran gently along, amid ash trees" (Borges). Words and images containing ash, even as names of trees, connote death, and even perhaps the ephemeral nature of life (especially in wartime) just as easily blown away. Once inside the sinologist Stephen Albert's library, Yu Tsun notices briefly that "The record on the phonograph revolved next to a bronze phoenix" (the Garden of Forking Paths"). But the Phoenix, a mythical creature that dies and then rises from its own ashes, seems oddly out-of-place in an otherwise very Asian-looking setting; and Yu Tsun's gaze does not in fact rest on it for very long. Soon afterward, Stephen Albert is dead, and then Madden appears.
