Somewhere above us, from behind the castle walls perhaps, a man yodels. It rings out over the terracotta rooftops and the forest towards the horizon. I wonder if he does this every time, to coax the celestial bodies, or if he, like me, is a virgin.
There are a hundred or so of us on the hillside, groups arranged discreetly in west-facing pockets of the topography — on rocky outcrops, under pine trees — private and collective, like opera boxes. A hundred bodies, several hundred lenses: silver specs, specialised binoculars, phones and long-barrelled cameras, a maritime sextant perhaps, like the one I know my dad will be unboxing in Scotland — all focusing light on this baked hillside tinderbox. That would be a fitting way to go.
The yodel makes me apprehensive — about distracting noises — but soon it is a distant memory. Everything has shifted. The land is newly lit gold. The grass, the colour of Alhambra beer. The castle walls and the belfry, a pink copper. Next to me, Meara’s belly eclipses a section of the lapis sky. Her mother puts her hand on it. “It’s kicking,” they say, with wide eyes. “It’s kicking like wild.”
I feel for the tremor, a miniature earth quaking under my palm. Far below us, a sharp shadow dissects the bullfighting ring. A voice in the town howls, and a collective inhalation rushes up the hillside, through my body and over the world. The sun turns black.
A month earlier, I find husband and wife Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Quereshi on eclipse-chaser-log.com, a website that logs eclipses and the number of minutes of totality witnessed by chasers from around the world. It’s a league table of sorts. Retired computer programmer and data analyst Kryss is number five in the UK (with 52 minutes 59 seconds of totality, from 20 total solar eclipses at the time of writing). Retired IT lecturer Talaat is a couple of places behind. Including partial and annular eclipses, Kryss has logged 29 in total, but, as I have been learning lately, even a 99% partial solar eclipse has nothing on a total eclipse. None of the theatre, mysticism, fear factor, skittish animal behaviour.
“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him,” says Annie Dillard in her landmark essay, Total Eclipse. Totality is in a league of its own. Totality is what they are chasing.
I can see from Kryss’s own pleasingly 1.0 website, replete with travelogues, essays, grainy photos and diagrammatic GIFs, that he is pedagogic about the subject; so when I discover the couple don’t live a million miles away, I get in touch, hoping that they might help me prepare for Spain. This apparently life-changing experience is going to last barely a minute and a half; I want to get it right.
We are in the eye of the year’s third heatwave when I travel to Wood Green to meet them. It’s a sultry 34 degrees, and the people of London are rushing from shade to shade with motorised fans in hand. As I step on the Tube, a push notification tells me that Bonnie Tyler has died in Faro, Portugal. I check if the town lies in the path of totality, which will sweep in a scythe-like arc from Greenland down to the Balearics, clipping the north-eastern tip of Portugal on 12 August.
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