The Last Word On Nothing

When the two minutes, forty seconds were over, each observer left her instrument, turned in silence from the sun, and wrote down brief notes. Happily, someone broke through all rules of order and shouted out, “The shadow! The shadow!” And, looking toward the south­east, we saw the black band of shadow moving from us, 160 miles over the plain, and toward the Indian Territory. It was not the flitting of the closer shadow over the hill and dale: it was a picture which the sun threw at our feet of the dignified march of the moon in its orbit.

And now we looked around. What a strange orange light there was in the north-east! What a spectral hue to the whole landscape! Was it really the same old Earth and not another planet?

So ends a journal entry describing the 1878 eclipse as observed by a group of women in Denver. No cosmological event produces such a mixture of awe and eeriness, and seemingly for as long as humans and eclipses have coexisted, we have been telling the tale.

To get you in the mood for next Monday’s big ‘un, we’re running a week of our own eclipse writing.