Text 1: Two minutes in the moon’s shadow, by Leila Harcourt

An original contemporary travel blog.

By eleven o’clock there were perhaps four hundred of us on the hillside above a village in southern Spain, sitting on camping chairs and coolboxes and the dry yellow grass. Some had come with telescopes the size of drainpipes. Most of us had come with a pair of cardboard glasses and a vague idea that something amazing was about to happen.

For the first hour, honestly, very little did. Through the glasses the sun was an orange coin with a bite taken out of it, and the bite grew slowly, like a biscuit being nibbled by someone with excellent manners. People chatted, ate crisps and checked their phones. A man next to me read a newspaper.

Then the light went wrong. That is the only way I can put it. It did not get dimmer so much as thinner, as though the colour were being drained out of the world. The shadows of the olive trees grew sharp-edged and strange. The air turned cool on my arms, and the swallows that had been swooping over the slope all morning simply vanished. Down in the village a dog began to howl, and nobody laughed.

Someone shouted and pointed west. Across the plain, a wall of darkness was racing towards us, swallowing farms and roads at a speed I still cannot quite believe. A last bead of light blazed on the edge of the moon, and then the sun went out.

Where it had been hung a black hole in the sky, ringed with a soft white fire that streamed outwards in long feathers. All around the horizon was a strip of sunset, orange and pink, as though evening had arrived in every direction at once. Four hundred people screamed. I screamed. A woman behind me was sobbing, and the newspaper man was on his feet with both hands on his head.

I had planned to take photographs. I took none. For one minute and forty seconds I just stood there with my mouth open, feeling very small and absurdly lucky.

Then a flash of daylight burst from the edge of the moon and the ordinary world came back, a little embarrassed, as if nothing had happened. People hugged strangers. On the coach afterwards nobody looked at their phones for a long time.

Text 2: A journal of the eclipse, by Harriet Mowbray

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this journal, written in 1860, a woman describes travelling with her brother, an amateur astronomer, to watch a total eclipse of the sun in Spain.

July 18th. We were upon the hill by eight o’clock, my brother having carried his telescope up the last mile himself rather than trust it to the mules. The villagers had followed us in great numbers, and stood about at a respectful distance, watching our preparations with evident distrust. One old woman told our guide that the English had come to put out the sun, and I fear she was not altogether joking.

The first touch of the moon upon the sun was announced by my brother in a voice of great calm, and he did not afterwards look up from his instrument for an hour together. I, who had no instrument and no duties, watched the light. It faded by degrees into a dull and sickly hue, such as I have seen before a thunderstorm, though the sky was without a cloud. A chill came upon the air, so that I was glad of my shawl, and the goats upon the hillside began to make their way homeward of their own accord, as if night were falling.

At the moment of totality a groan rose from the villagers, and many fell upon their knees. I do not wonder at it. The sun was gone, and in its place stood a disc of perfect blackness, encircled by a glory of pale silver light, with here and there small flames of the most beautiful rose colour starting from its edge. Stars shone out above us at noonday. I confess that I trembled, and that the words of a prayer came to my lips before I knew it.

It lasted, my brother tells me, three minutes and some seconds. To me it was at once an instant and an age. When the light returned, the villagers rose and crossed themselves and began to talk all at once, and an old goatherd came up and shook my brother solemnly by the hand, as though he had personally restored the sun to its place.

My brother is well satisfied with his observations. I have no observations to offer, only this: that I have seen the world as it might look upon the last day, and that I shall never again think the sunrise an ordinary thing.

Both of these texts are about watching a total eclipse of the sun.

Compare:

• the writers’ experiences of the eclipse
• how the writers make these experiences clear to readers

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