noon
The city , with its numberless gables , spires of churches , turreted gate-houses , occupied a ridge of gradually swelling ground which rose like a huge whale-back from the misty plain . Its walls were grim , high , and far-stretching . But as we travelled farther into the Wolfmark the city seemed to sink deeper into the plain and the dark castle of Duke Casimir to shoot ever higher into the skies . So that presently , as we looked back , we could only see the Wolfsberg itself , the abode of cruelty and wrong , standing black against the white sky of noon . Its flanking towers stood up above the battlemented wall , their turrets climbing higher and higher towards heaven , till the topmost Red Tower -- that in which my father 's garrot was , and in which I had spent my entire life until this day -- soared straight upward above them all , like a threatening index-finger pointing , not into the clear sky of a summer 's noon , but into clouds and thick darkness . I was glad when at last we lost sight of it . Then , indeed , I felt that I had left my old life behind me .