Noon lay heavier on the gardens; not our live humming warmth but the stale
exhalation of dead summers. The very statues seemed to drowse like watchers
by a death-bed. Lizards shot out of the cracked soil like flames and the
bench in the laurustinus-niche was strewn with the blue varnished bodies of
dead flies. Before us lay the fish-pond, a yellow marble slab above rotting
secrets. The villa looked across it, composed as a dead face, with the
cypresses flanking it for candles....