Crucial Instances

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….