The first time that I was at Darjeeling it was veiled in perpetual
mists; on the last occasion, to compensate for this, there were ten
days of continual clear weather. Then it is that it is worth while
getting up at 5.30 a.m. and going down into a frost-nipped garden,
there to wait patiently in the dark. In the eastern sky there is that
faintest of jade-green glimmers, known as the "false dawn"; below it
the deep valleys are still wrapped in dark purple shadows, when quite
suddenly Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn," _rododachtulos Aeos_, (was
ever more beautiful epithet coined?) lays one shy, tentative
finger-tip of blazing, flaming crimson on a vast unseen bulk, towering
up 28,000 feet into the air. Then quickly comes a second flaming
finger-tip, and a third, until you are fronting a colossal pyramid of
the most intensely vivid rose-colour imaginable. It is a glorious
sight! Suddenly, in one minute, the crimson splendour is replaced by
the most dazzling, intense white, and as much as the eye can grasp of
the two-thousand-mile-long mountain-rampart springs into light, peak
after peak, blazing with white radiance, whilst the world below is
still slumbering in the half-shadows, and the valleys are filled with
purple darkness. I do not believe that there is any more splendidly
sublime sight to be seen in the whole world. For a while the eternal
snows, unchanging in their calm majesty, dominate the puny world
below, and then, because perhaps it would not be good to gaze for long
on so magnificent a spectacle, the mists fall and the whole scene is
blotted out, leaving in the memory a revelation of unspeakable
grandeur. I saw this sunrise daily for a week, and its glories seemed
greater every day. For some reason that I cannot explain it always
recalled to me a passage in Job xxxviii, "When the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."