Scroll slowly.

First contact

A notch. So small you doubt it: a fingernail pressed into the right-hand edge of the Sun. Somebody says there, and forty people lift cardboard glasses to their faces.

Partial

For an hour it is only a fact. The day is still a day. You drink warm coffee from a flask lid, and behind your glasses the bite widens, slow as a tide.

Under the tree

Look down. Every gap between the leaves has turned into a pinhole camera, and the ground under the ash tree is covered in hundreds of small crescent suns, all facing the same way.

Four fifths gone

The light goes strange before it goes dark: thin, as if the day were running low on battery. Colours drain toward silver. Your shadow has edges you could cut paper with; you can count the hairs on its head.

One minute

The warmth has gone out of the sunlight on your arms. A breeze starts up that wasn’t there before. Nobody on the hill is talking now.

Shadow bands

Faint stripes shiver across the field like light on the floor of a swimming pool. To your right, in the west, a wall of dusk stands up from the horizon and comes at you faster than sound.

Baily’s beads

The last sunlight breaks into beads, pouring through valleys on the edge of the Moon. They go out one by one. One is left, and it burns like a diamond on a ring.

Second contact

Glasses off. Where the Sun was there is a hole in the sky, and around it a pale fire nobody told you would look alive. Somebody behind you is crying. A dog howls.

Maximum

Sunset in every direction at once. Venus, lower left, bright as a landing light. Rooks cross the field to roost, fooled. It is six degrees colder than it was at lunch.

Third contact

One bead of light on the opposite edge and it is over. Glasses on. The dark slides away east and daylight floods back from the west, and you would give a great deal for it to stop.

After

The crescents under the tree now face the other way. Down in the village a cock crows, for the second time today.

Returning

Colour comes back to the field in the order it left. The light is ordinary again by degrees, and nobody quite trusts it.

Packing up

People fold tripods and shake out blankets. The Moon is still on the Sun, but nobody is looking up. The best part has had its turn.

Fourth contact

The last notch closes. To everyone who wasn’t here, an ordinary afternoon.

Next time, travel to it.