It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the 
death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the 
region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep 
from which you wake yourself whimpering. We had crossed the mountains that 
day, and now we were in a strange place—a hotel in central Washington, in a town 
near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early in the next 
morning.

I lay in bed. My husband, Gary, was reading beside me. I lay in bed and looked at 
the painting on the hotel room wall. It was a print of a detailed and lifelike painting 
of a smiling clown’s head, made out of vegetables. It was a painting of the sort 
which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget. Some 
tasteless fate presses it upon you; it becomes part of the complex interior junk you 
carry with you wherever you go. Two years have passed since the total eclipse of 
which I write. During those years I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I 
wanted to remember—but I have not forgotten that clown painting or its lunatic 
setting in the old hotel. The clown was bald. Actually, he wore a clown’s tight 
rubber wig, painted white; this stretched over the top of his skull, which was a 
cabbage. His hair was bunches of baby carrots. Inset in his white clown makeup, 
and in his cabbage skull, were his small and laughing human eyes. The clown’s 
glance was like the glance of Rembrandt in some of the self-portraits: lively, 
knowing, deep, and loving. The crinkled shadows around his eyes were string 
beans. His eyebrows were parsley. Each of his ears was a broad bean. His thin, 
joyful lips were red chili peppers; between his lips were wet rows of human teeth 
and a suggestion of a real tongue. The clown print was framed in gilt and glassed.

To put ourselves in the path of the total eclipse, that day we had driven five hours 
inland from the Washington coast, where we lived. When we tried to cross the 
Cascades range, an avalanche had blocked the pass.

A slope’s worth of snow blocked the road; traffic backed up. Had the avalanche 
buried any cars that morning? We could not learn. This highway was the only 
winter road over the mountains. We waited as highway crews bulldozed a passage 
through the avalanche. With two-by-fours and walls of plywood, they erected a 
one-way, roofed tunnel through the avalanche. We drove through the avalanche 
tunnel, crossed the pass, and descended several thousand feet into central 
Washington and the broad Yakima valley, about which we knew only that it was 
orchard country. As we lost altitude, the snows disappeared; our ears popped; the 
trees changed, and in the trees were strange birds. I watched the landscape
innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the 
bottom while his air runs out.

The hotel lobby was a dark, derelict room, narrow as a corridor, and seemingly 
without air. We waited on a couch while the manager vanished upstairs to do 
something unknown to our room. Beside us on an overstuffed chair, absolutely 
motionless, was a platinum-blonde woman in her forties wearing a black silk dress 
and a strand of pearls. Her long legs were crossed; she supported her head on her 
fist. At the dim far end of the room, their backs toward us, sat six bald old men in 
their shirtsleeves, around a loud television. Two of them seemed asleep. They were 
drunks. “Number six!” cried the man on television, “Number six!”

On the broad lobby desk, lighted and bubbling, was a ten-gallon aquarium 
containing one large fish; the fish tilted up and down in its water. Against the long 
opposite wall sang a live canary in its cage. Beneath the cage, among spilled millet 
seeds on the carpet, were a decorated child’s sand bucket and matching sand 
shovel.

Now the alarm was set for 6. I lay awake remembering an article I had read 
downstairs in the lobby, in an engineering magazine. The article was about gold 
mining.

In South Africa, in India, and in South Dakota, the gold mines extend so deeply 
into the Earth’s crust that they are hot. The rock walls burn the miners’ hands. The 
companies have to air-condition the mines; if the air conditioners break, the miners 
die. The elevators in the mine shafts run very slowly, down, and up, so the miners’ 
ears will not pop in their skulls. When the miners return to the surface, their faces 
are deathly pale.

Early the next morning we checked out. It was February 26, 1979, a Monday 
morning. We would drive out of town, find a hilltop, watch the eclipse, and then 
drive back over the mountains and home to the coast. How familiar things are here; 
how adept we are; how smoothly and professionally we check out! I had forgotten 
the clown’s smiling head and the hotel lobby as if they had never existed. Gary put 
the car in gear and off we went, as off we have gone to a hundred other adventures.

It was dawn when we found a highway out of town and drove into the unfamiliar 
countryside. By the growing light we could see a band of cirrostratus clouds in the 
sky. Later the rising sun would clear these clouds before the eclipse began. We 
drove at random until we came to a range of unfenced hills. We pulled off the 
highway, bundled up, and climbed one of these hills.

The hill was 500 feet high. Long winter-killed grass covered it, as high as our 
knees. We climbed and rested, sweating in the cold; we passed clumps of bundled 
people on the hillside who were setting up telescopes and fiddling with cameras. 
The top of the hill stuck up in the middle of the sky. We tightened our scarves and 
looked around.

East of us rose another hill like ours. Between the hills, far below, 13 was the 
highway which threaded south into the valley. This was the Yakima valley; I had 
never seen it before. It is justly famous for its beauty, like every planted valley. It 
extended south into the horizon, a distant dream of a valley, a Shangri-la. All its 
hundreds of low, golden slopes bore orchards. Among the orchards were towns, 
and roads, and plowed and fallow fields. Through the valley wandered a thin, 
shining river; from the river extended fine, frozen irrigation ditches. Distance 
blurred and blued the sight, so that the whole valley looked like a thickness or 
sediment at the bottom of the sky. Directly behind us was more sky, and empty 
lowlands blued by distance, and Mount Adams. Mount Adams was an enormous, 
snow-covered volcanic cone rising flat, like so much scenery.

Now the sun was up. We could not see it; but the sky behind the band of clouds 
was yellow, and, far down the valley, some hillside orchards had lighted up. More 
people were parking near the highway and climbing the hills. It was the West. All 
of us rugged individualists were wearing knit caps and blue nylon parkas. People 
were climbing the nearby hills and setting up shop in clumps among the dead 
grasses. It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on 
its last day. It looked as though we had all crawled out of spaceships and were 
preparing to assault the valley below. It looked as though we were scattered on 
hilltops at dawn to sacrifice virgins, make rain, set stone stelae in a ring. There was 
no place out of the wind. The straw grasses banged our legs.

Up in the sky where we stood the air was lusterless yellow. To the west the sky was 
blue. Now the sun cleared the clouds. We cast rough shadows on the blowing 
grass; freezing, we waved our arms. Near the sun, the sky was bright and colorless. 
There was nothing to see.

It began with no ado. It was odd that such a well advertised public event should 
have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have known 
right then that I was out of my depth. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a 
piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welders’ goggles. A piece of 
the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky.

I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears 
almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation 
to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an 
airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes 
the other, it in no way prepares you for it. During a partial eclipse the sky does not 
darken—not even when 94 percent of the sun is hidden. Nor does the sun, seen 
colorless through protective devices, seem terribly strange. We have all seen a 
sliver of light in the sky; we have all seen the crescent moon by day. However, 
during a partial eclipse the air does indeed get cold, precisely as if someone were 
standing between you and the fire. And blackbirds do fly back to their roosts. I had 
seen a partial eclipse before, and here was another.

What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know. It is especially 
different for those of us whose grasp of astronomy is so frail that, given a 
flashlight, a grapefruit, two oranges, and 15 years, we still could not figure out 
which way to set the clocks for daylight saving time. Usually it is a bit of a trick to 
keep your knowledge from blinding you. But during an eclipse it is easy. What you 
see is much more convincing than any wild-eyed theory you may know.

You may read that the moon has something to do with eclipses. I have never seen 
the moon yet. You do not see the moon. So near the sun, it is as completely 
invisible as the stars are by day. What you see before your eyes is the sun going 
through phases. It gets narrower and narrower, as the waning moon does, and, like 
the ordinary moon, it travels alone in the simple sky. The sky is of course 
background. It does not appear to eat the sun; it is far behind the sun. The sun 
simply shaves away; gradually, you see less sun and more sky.

The sky’s blue was deepening, but there was no darkness. The sun was a wide 
crescent, like a segment of tangerine. The wind freshened and blew steadily over 
the hill. The eastern hill across the highway grew dusky and sharp. The towns and 
orchards in the valley to the south were dissolving into the blue light. Only the thin 
river held a trickle of sun.

Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark sky usually 
loses color. This was a saturated, deep indigo, up in the air. Stuck up into that 
unworldly sky was the cone of Mount Adams, and the alpenglow was upon it. The 
alpenglow is that red light of sunset which holds out on snowy mountaintops long 
after the valleys and tablelands are dimmed. “Look at Mount Adams,” I said, and 
that was the last sane moment I remember.

I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was 
wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, 
head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s 
platinum print. This color has never been seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; 
their finish was matte. The hillside was a 19th-century tinted photograph from 
which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and 
detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were 
silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. 
I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was 
standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses 
filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the 
real light of day.

I looked at Gary. He was in the film. Everything was lost. He was a platinum print, 
a dead artist’s version of life. I saw on his skull the darkness of night mixed with 
the colors of day. My mind was going out; my eyes were receding the way galaxies 
recede to the rim of space. Gary was light-years away, gesturing inside a circle of 
darkness, down the wrong end of a telescope. He smiled as if he saw me; the 
stringy crinkles around his eyes moved. The sight of him, familiar and wrong, was 
something I was remembering from centuries hence, from the other side of death: 
Yes, that is the way he used to look, when we were living. When it was our 
generation’s turn to be alive. I could not hear him; the wind was too loud. Behind 
him the sun was going. We had all started down a chute of time. At first it was 
pleasant; now there was no stopping it. Gary was chuting away across space, 
moving and talking and catching my eye, chuting down the long corridor of 
separation. The skin on his face moved like thin bronze plating that would peel.

The grass at our feet was wild barley. It was the wild einkorn wheat which grew on 
the hilly flanks of the Zagros Mountains, above the Euphrates valley, above the 
valley of the river we called River. We harvested the grass with stone sickles, I 
remember. We found the grasses on the hillsides; we built our shelter beside them 
and cut them down. That is how he used to look then, that one, moving and living 
and catching my eye, with the sky so dark behind him, and the wind blowing. God 
save our life.

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was 
detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. 
It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over 
the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun 
like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain 
slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky 
was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring 
of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, 
the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating 
and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth 
rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. 
Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and 
our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our
 lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In 
the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light.
It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old 
wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over.

It is now that the temptation is strongest to leave these regions. We have seen 
enough; let’s go. Why burn our hands any more than we have to? But two years 
have passed; the price of gold has risen. I return to the same buried alluvial beds 
and pick through the strata again.

I saw, early in the morning, the sun diminish against a backdrop of sky. I saw a 
circular piece of that sky appear, suddenly detached, blackened, and backlighted; 
from nowhere it came and overlapped the sun. It did not look like the moon. It was 
enormous and black. If I had not read that it was the moon, I could have seen the 
sight a hundred times and never thought of the moon once. (If, however, I had not 
read that it was the moon—if, like most of the world’s people throughout time, I 
had simply glanced up and seen this thing—then I doubtless would not have 
speculated much, but would have, like Emperor Louis of Bavaria in 840, simply 
died of fright on the spot.) It did not look like a dragon, although it looked more 
like a dragon than the moon. It looked like a lens cover, or the lid of a pot. It 
materialized out of thin air—black, and flat, and sliding, outlined in flame.

Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. 
The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itself. 
If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the
horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, 
was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as 
it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for 
people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if 
you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the 
world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the 
ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for 
good, and evil. Its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable 
caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid 
was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about 
us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, 
frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater 
from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.

You have seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse. The corona fills 
the print. All of those photographs were taken through telescopes. The lenses of 
telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array 
than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience. 
Lenses enlarge the sight, omit its context, and make of it a pretty and sensible 
picture, like something on a Christmas card. I assure you, if you send any 
shepherds a Christmas card on which is printed a three-by-three photograph of the 
angel of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, and a multitude of the heavenly host, they 
will not be sore afraid. More fearsome things can come in envelopes. More moving 
photographs than those of the sun’s corona can appear in magazines. But I pray 
you will never see anything more awful in the sky.

You see the wide world swaddled in darkness; you see a vast breadth of hilly land, 
and an enormous, distant, blackened valley; you see towns’ lights, a river’s path, 
and blurred portions of your hat and scarf; you see your husband’s face looking 
like an early black-and-white film; and you see a sprawl of black sky and blue sky 
together, with unfamiliar stars in it, some barely visible bands of cloud, and over 
there, a small white ring. The ring is as small as one goose in a flock of migrating 
geese—if you happen to notice a flock of migrating geese. It is one-360th part of 
the visible sky. The sun we see is less than half the diameter of a dime held at 
arm’s length.

The Crab Nebula, in the constellation Taurus, looks, through binoculars, like a 
smoke ring. It is a star in the process of exploding. Light from its explosion first 
reached the Earth in 1054; it was a supernova then, and so bright it shone in the 
daytime. Now it is not so bright, but it is still exploding. It expands at the rate of 70 
million miles a day. It is interesting to look through binoculars at something 
expanding 70 million miles a day. It does not budge. Its apparent size does not 
increase. Photographs of the Crab Nebula taken 15 years ago seem identical to 
photographs of it taken yesterday. Some lichens are similar. Botanists have 
measured some ordinary lichens twice, at 50-year intervals, without detecting any 
growth at all. And yet their cells divide; they live.

The small ring of light was like these things—like a ridiculous lichen up in the sky, 
like a perfectly still explosion 4,200 light-years away: It was interesting, and 
lovely, and in witless motion, and it had nothing to do with anything.
It had nothing to do with anything. The sun was too small, and too cold, and too far 
away, to keep the world alive. The white ring was not enough. It was feeble and 
worthless. It was as useless as a memory; it was as off-kilter and hollow and 
wretched as a memory.

When you try your hardest to recall someone’s face, or the look of a place, you see 
in your mind’s eye some vague and terrible sight such as this. It is dark; it is 
insubstantial; it is all wrong.

The white ring and the saturated darkness made the Earth and the sky look as they 
must look in the memories of the careless dead. What I saw, what I seemed to be 
standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed 
upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of Yakima, and 
were alone in eternity. Empty space stoppered our eyes and mouths; we cared for 
nothing. We remembered our living days wrong. With great effort we had 
remembered some sort of circular light in the sky—but only the outline. Oh, and 
then the orchard trees withered, the ground froze, the glaciers slid down the valleys 
and overlapped the towns. If there had ever been people on Earth, nobody knew it. 
The dead had forgotten those they had loved. The dead were parted one from the 
other and could no longer remember the faces and lands they had loved in the light. 
They seemed to stand on darkened hilltops, looking down.

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our 
children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human 
culture on the planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We 
have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a t
ransition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we 
plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our 
sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or 
recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add—until someone hauls their wealth up 
to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.

I do not know how we got to the restaurant. Like Roethke, “I take my waking 
slow.” Gradually I seemed more or less alive, and already forgetful. It was now 
almost 9 in the morning. It was the day of a solar eclipse in central Washington, 
and a fine adventure for everyone. The sky was clear; there was a fresh breeze out 
of the north.

The restaurant was a roadside place with tables and booths. The other eclipse-
watchers were there. From our booth we could see their cars’ California license 
plates, their University of Washington parking stickers. Inside the restaurant we 
were all eating eggs or waffles; people were fairly shouting and exchanging 
enthusiasms, like fans after a World Series game. Did you see ... ? Did you see ... ? 
Then somebody said something which knocked me for a loop.

A college student, a boy in a blue parka who carried a Hasselblad, said to us, “Did 
you see that little white ring? It looked like a Life Saver. It looked like a Life Saver 
up in the sky.”

And so it did. The boy spoke well. He was a walking alarm clock. I myself had at 
that time no access to such a word. He could write a sentence, and I could not. I 
grabbed that Life Saver and rode it to the surface. And I had to laugh. I had been 
dumbstruck on the Euphrates River, I had been dead and gone and grieving, all 
over the sight of something which, if you could claw your way up to that level, you 
would grant looked very much like a Life Saver. It was good to be back among 
people so clever; it was good to have all the world’s words at the mind’s disposal, 
so the mind could begin its task. All those things for which we have no words are 
lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a 
decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the 
continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives.

There are a few more things to tell from this level, the level of the restaurant. One 
is the old joke about breakfast. “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.” Wallace 
Stevens wrote that, and in the long run he was right. The mind wants to live 
forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to 
return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all 
eternity, and God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple 
spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the 
proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

Further: While the mind reels in deep space, while the mind grieves or fears or 
exults, the workaday senses, in ignorance or idiocy, like so many computer 
terminals printing out market prices while the world blows up, still transcribe their 
little data and transmit them to the warehouse in the skull. Later, under the 
tranquilizing influence of fried eggs, the mind can sort through this data. The 
restaurant was a halfway house, a decompression chamber. There I remembered a 
few things more.

The deepest, and most terrifying, was this: I have said that I heard screams. (I have 
since read that screaming, with hysteria, is a common reaction even to expected 
total eclipses.) People on all the hillsides, including, I think, myself, screamed 
when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. 
But something else was happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, 
which made us scream.

The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding 
at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. 
It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of 
the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. 
Language can give no sense of this sort of speed—1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 
miles wide. No end was in sight—you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the 
land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and 
knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot 
up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, “Soon it will hit 
my brain.” You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, 
inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and 
screamed before it hit.

This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the 
universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. 
How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a 
car out of control on a turn?

Less than two minutes later, when the sun emerged, the trailing edge of the shadow 
cone sped away. It coursed down our hill and raced eastward over the plain, faster 
than the eye could believe; it swept over the plain and dropped over the planet’s
rim in a twinkling. It had clobbered us, and now it roared away. We blinked in the 
light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and 
slapped the Earth’s face.

Something else, something more ordinary, came back to me along about the third 
cup of coffee. During the moments of totality, it was so dark that drivers on the 
highway below turned on their cars’ headlights. We could see the highway’s route 
as a strand of lights. It was bumper-to-bumper down there. It was 8:15 in the 
morning, Monday morning, and people were driving into Yakima to work. That it 
was as dark as night, and eerie as hell, an hour after dawn, apparently meant that in 
order to see to drive to work, people had to use their headlights. Four or five cars 
pulled off the road. The rest, in a line at least five miles long, drove to town. The 
highway ran between hills; the people could not have seen any of the eclipsed 
sun at all. Yakima will have another total eclipse in 2086. Perhaps, in 2086, businesses 
will give their employees an hour off.

From the restaurant we drove back to the coast. The highway crossing the 
Cascades range was open. We drove over the mountain like old pros. We joined our 
places on the planet’s thin crust; it held. For the time being, we were home free.

Early that morning at 6, when we had checked out, the six bald men were sitting on 
folding chairs in the dim hotel lobby. The television was on. Most of them were 
awake. You might drown in your own spittle, God knows, at any time; you might 
wake up dead in a small hotel, a cabbage head watching TV while snows pile up in 
the passes, watching TV while the chili peppers smile and the moon passes 
over the sun and nothing changes and nothing is learned because you have lost your 
bucket and shovel and no longer care. What if you regain the surface and open 
your sack and find, instead of treasure, a beast which jumps at you? Or you may 
not come back at all. The winches may jam, the scaffolding buckle, the air 
conditioning collapse. You may glance up one day and see by your headlamp the 
canary keeled over in its cage. You may reach into a cranny for pearls and touch a 
moray eel. You yank on your rope; it is too late.

Apparently people share a sense of these hazards, for when the total eclipse ended, 
an odd thing happened.

When the sun appeared as a blinding bead on the ring’s side, the eclipse was over. 
The black lens cover appeared again, back-lighted, and slid away. At once the 
yellow light made the sky blue again; the black lid dissolved and vanished. The 
real world began there. I remember now: We all hurried away. We were born and 
bored at a stroke. We rushed down the hill. We found our car; we saw the other 
people streaming down the hillsides; we joined the highway traffic and drove 
away.

We never looked back. It was a general vamoose, and an odd one, for when we left 
the hill, the sun was still partially eclipsed—a sight rare enough, and one which, in 
itself, we would probably have driven five hours to see. But enough is enough. One 
turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, 
and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes 
of home.