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 cannot to this
hour account (unless the rain was the cause), 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 chateau,
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.
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