Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/32

 and took a grass-grown path that led through a tangle of ivy and cypress hedge toward the back of the house.

For more than a hundred feet Winnery made his way through a sort of tunnel of foliage, so thick that even at this season the earth beneath his feet seemed damp and moist, and then all at once he came upon the most extraordinary and beautiful garden. It was large and square in size and so placed upon the artificially raised terrace that it seemed to hang in space above the valley. The garden was entirely of greenery, a sort of vast chamber of which roof and walls were made of foliage. There was no flower of any sort. The villa itself made one wall and the other three sides were entirely closed by the thick walls of ancient cypresses of a size Winnery had never seen save at Tivoli. Near the ground where the cypresses had no foliage, light, reflected from the grey and yellow valley below, filtered in between the ancient grey trunks. Over the whole garden there was a living roof made by the branches of countless plane trees planted to form colonnades and so trimmed and trained that their yellowing leaves shut out all heat and light. Within this area the sun never penetrated and there was no grass but only a carpet of red clay flecked here and there by patches of moss which in the extraordinary light had turned an unreal and poisonous shade of green. It was as if in the entire parched and desolate valley, life, green and exuberant, flourished only within this enclosure. 