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This is hugely significant given that we discover at the end of the passage that this is supposed to be the ‘Fertilizing Room’.

We’ve now gone from literal coldness to a figurative coldness that has led us to the lack of sexual desire and activity. Figuratively, ‘cold’ can also mean lacking sexual passion, from where we get the synonym ‘frigid’. We must now think that the room is not just a cold temperature, but cold in the same way in which we’d describe someone as being heartless or lacking in feeling. And this is where rhetoric unfolds into theme. So the first cold might well be literal, but the second cold must be figurative. But it can’t be, because a room can’t literally be cold and tropically hot at the same time. The zeugma makes us think that it’s the same cold in each clause. The ‘cold’ of the first clause governs the second clause as well, even though it’s not repeated at the beginning of it. One answer to this question comes from looking at the rhetorical device Huxley’s using here. That’s the natural reading process, but it flounders on the second clause: ‘the room is cold for all the tropical heat of the room itself’? How could this be so? How can the room be both hot and cold at the same time?

There is actually no grammatical subject in these two clauses, so we just assume that the subject remains the same as it’s been in the previous sentence – the room is cold for all the summer beyond the panes.

The second sentence confirms this emotional response because it opens with the word ‘cold’: ‘cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself’. So already two pieces of information – enormous and north facing – actually create in the reader an emotional response: we raise our shoulders and shiver slightly as we enter into the room and the paragraph that describes it. As we all know from buying houses, north facing rooms are not coveted – they get little sunlight. It’s ‘enormous’, it’s on the ‘ground floor’ and it faces north. What do we learn about this room? The first sentence gives us three pieces of information: size, location and aspect.