The Sun.
London, England, 1851-08-07 00:00:00

flight ; small hand lamps 50 or 60 yards off in a
hollow were as visible as in a dark night, and with
their red colour, contrasting strangely with the gene-
ral green hue of everything immediately around. But
the appearance of the country seen through that lurid
opening under the clouds was the most appalling.
Though standing in the centre of the shadow, we
could yet, by reason of their great height, see the
distant peaks of the lofty Jostedals and Dovrefjeld
mountains, still illuminated by the rays of the sun
descending upon them from on high, but we were
shut out into outer darkness. Some approximation
to the appearance might be obtained by watching the
opportunity of a similar configuration of clouds in the
north from the Calton Hill during a midsummer's mid-
night,
but still it would be only an approximation, for
never have we observed all the lights of heaven '
and earth so entirely confined to one narrow strip
along the horizon, never that peculiar greenish
hue, and never that appearance of outer darkness in
the place of observation, and of excessive distance
in the verge of the horison (caused in this case
by the hills there being more highly illumi-
nated as they receded, by a less and less
eclipsed sun ; while in a morning or evening sky
they are, on the contrary, most in the shade, and
therefore are dark and unnaturally thrown forward).
Though none of us were unmoved with gratitude at
having been allowed to witness such a spectacle,
though we should have been glad to have enjoyed its
teaching for a longer space of time, and should have
been alarmed, indeed, if it had not happened as it did,
and with such wonderful accuracy to the computed
time, yet a certain feeling of relief was experienced
when the lurid streak in the sky suddenly changed to
yellow, when the clouds brightened up, and the dark-
ness seemed to be wafted visibly away to the south-
east. The sea-birds that had stopped their screaming
during the darkness now re-appeared ; but the wild
Norsemen of those rocky isles, who had congregated
so curiously r,round us during the commencement of
the eclipse, when the light returned, where were
they ? gone to hide themselves in their huts,
thinking that they were in the jaws of
destruction, amongst the stones of darkness
and in the shadow of death. Such we heard
afterwards was the general feeling amongst them all
along the coast, even beyond the limits of total ob-
scuration. Horses and oxen began to wend their
way homeward, and poultry to fly up to their roosts ;
but one farmer informed us that an amusing scene of
confusion took place when the fowls found the dark-
ness coming on so quickly that they could not all
get placed on their perches in time ; and then,
again, when they found by the quickly returning
light that they had had a false alarm. We also heard
that there had been over all that line of the country
such excessive rain that day that our party, enabled
by the lighthouse steamer to take up the peculiar
position we did, was probably the only one that had
had the good luck to make any accurate observations ;
a circumstance the more fortunate, inasmuch as that
was the earliest part of Europe visited by the shadow
in its progress from west to east."