about
three A.M.
Noteworthy among them was an excursion to the highest levels of the city and to the roof itself . The affair was planned by Admiral von Kufner in Marguerite 's honour ; for , having spent her childhood elsewhere , she had never experienced the wonder of this roof excursion so highly prized by Royalty , and for ever forbidden to all other women and to all but a few men of the teeming millions who swarmed like larvae in this vast concrete cheese . The formal invitations set no hour for the excursion as it was understood that the exact time depended upon weather conditions of which we would later be notified . When this notice came the hour set was in the conventional evening of the Royal Level , but corresponding to about three A.M. by solar time . The party gathered at the suite of the Countess Luise and numbered some forty people , for whom a half dozen guides were provided in the form of officers of the Roof Guard . The journey to our romantic destination took us up some hundred metres in an elevator , a trip which required but two minutes , but would lead to a world as different as Mount Olympus from Erebus . But we did not go directly to the roof , for the hour preferred for that visit had not yet arrived and our first stop was at the swine levels , which had so aroused my curiosity and strained belief when I had first discovered their existence from the chart of my atlas .