They cut the lock-straps with their daggers, and then found themselves beneath the front that faced Carthage, in another garden full of trimmed vegetation.

Lines of white flowers all following one another in regular succession formed long parabolas like star-rockets on the azure-coloured earth.

The gloomy bushes exhaled warm and honied odours.

There were trunks of trees smeared with cinnabar, which resembled columns covered with blood.

In the centre were twelve pedestals, each supporting a great glass ball, and these hollow globes were indistinctly filled with reddish lights, like enormous and still palpitating eyeballs.