three o'clock in the morning
Chamonix meant the great range of Mont Blanc , and Sylvia Thesiger had the passion for mountains in her blood . The first appearance of their distant snows stirred her as no emotion ever had , so that she came to date her life by these appearances rather than by the calendar of months and days . The morning when from the hotel windows at Glion she had first seen the twin peaks of the Dent du Midi towering in silver high above a blue corner of the Lake of Geneva , formed one memorable date . Once , too , in the winter-time , as the Rome express stopped at three o'clock in the morning at the frontier on the Italian side of the Mont Cenis tunnel , she had carefully lifted the blind on the right-hand side of the sleeping compartment and had seen a great wall of mountains tower up in a clear frosty moonlight from great buttresses of black rock to delicate pinnacles of ice soaring infinite miles away into a cloudless sky of blue . She had come near to tears that night as she looked from the window ; such a tumult of vague longings rushed suddenly in upon her and uplifted her . She was made aware of dim uncomprehended thoughts stirring in the depths of her being , and her soul was drawn upward to those glittering spires , as to enchanted magnets . Ever afterward Sylvia looked forward , through weeks , to those few moments in her mother 's annual itinerary , and prayed with all her heart that the night might be clear of mist and rain .