midnight
At all events , we did not remain long in any place till we came to Turin , where we spent nine days , she in the house opposite mine , and after that , at her own suggestion , went on still , passing by train into the valley of the Isère , and then into that of the Western Rhone , till we came to the old town of Geneva among some very great mountains peaked with snow , the town seated at the head of a long lake which the earth has made in the shape of the crescent moon , and like the moon it is a thing of much beauty and many moods , suggesting a creature under the spell of charms and magics . However , with this idea of Vauclaire still in my head , we left Geneva in the motor which had brought us at four in the afternoon of the 17th May , I intending to reach the town called Bourg that night about eight , and there sleep , so to go on to Lyons the next morning by train , and so , by the Bordeaux route , make Vauclaire . But by some chance for which I can not to this hour account -LRB- unless the rain was the cause -RRB- , I missed the chart-road , which should have been fairly level , and found myself on mountain tracks , unconscious of my whereabouts , while darkness fell , and a windless downpour that had a certain sullen venom in its superabundance drenched us . I stopped several times , looking about for château , chalet , or village , but none did I see , though I twice came upon railway lines ; and not till midnight did we run down a rather steep pass upon the shore of a lake , which , from its apparent vastness in the moonless obscurity , I could only suppose to be the Lake of Geneva once again . About two hundred yards to the left we saw through the rain a large pile , apparently risen straight out of the lake , looking ghostly livid , for it was of white stone , not high , but an old thing of complicated white little turrets roofed with dark red candle extinguishers , and oddities of Gothic nooks , window slits , and outline , very like a fanciful picture . Round to this we went , drowned as rats , Leda sighing and bedraggled , and found a narrow spit of low land projecting into the lake , where we left the car , walked forward with the bag , crossed a small wooden drawbridge , and came upon a rocky island with a number of thick-foliaged trees about the castle . We quickly found a small open portal , and went throughout the place , quite gay at the shelter , everywhere lighting candles which we found in iron sconces in the rather queer apartments : so that , as the castle is far seen from the shores of the lake , it would have appeared to one looking thence a place suddenly possessed and haunted .