March 2006
I was not prepared for the awe of those four minutes. We had driven eight hours to reach Salloum on the border with Libya and had camped out in what felt like a refugee camp with 4,000 other eclipse seekers, many of whom had flown in from all parts of the world just to experience this feat of nature.
The night before, in Cairo, I went to bed early since I knew I would be getting up at 5am. As I lay in bed, I wondered what the large bang was outside my window. The boom sounded like thunder but in the seven years I've been living in Cairo I'd never heard that noise from my bedroom. But sure enough, rain was pouring down outside my window accompanied by thunder, lightning! The next morning the usually ubiquitous taxis were nowhere to be seen. I waited and waited on the quiet street, placing my bags in the one patch of ground that wasn't wet, in front of the soldiers who also watched me silently. Finally a taxi came by full of men and stopped to ask the soldiers where Baghat Ali street was. The soldiers didn't know, but I answered them in my broken Arabic. Soon, a few minutes later, the same taxi cab came barreling down the one way street the wrong way to come pick me up! One of our group, who lives on the same street as I do, arrived in his taxi just after the bus had left and he had to chase down the bus!
Although I had been on ARCE trips before, the group on this one was quite different. Although a number of us were from AUC, there were also a number of people who had flown into Egypt from The United States, Britain and Switzerland especially for the event. We were a nice mix of expats, foreigners and Egyptians. One of my Egyptian friends told me that this was her first camping trip to the desert. But I had to explain to her that this was not the normal desert camping experience. Since 8,000 people were all headed to the border town of Salloum, next to Libya, we were herded into designated spots set up by the government. Although it was desert, there was no possibility of being able to experience the expanse and quiet that I normally find on our desert camping trips. We were put into spacious tents set up in orderly rows with guards watching everywhere. No bonfires were allowed and one had to que up for the bathroom. There was no place where you could be "out of sight". Up above the Mediterranean on this plateau - in an army zone that stretched out flat to the border of Libya, a new tent town had emerged complete with oriental rugs on the ground and large spacious tent dining rooms with colorfully designed patterned material on the walls and white tablecloths.
The morning of the eclipse, I was woken up in my tent by drops of water falling on me. I wondered if Monday's rain storm had come back. But looking outside the flaps of the tent, all I could see was a heavy mist. My new Swiss friends and their Swedish host asked me anxiously whether the mist would lift or not. I confidently told them that it would burn off between 9:30am and 10:00. But the morning mist gave the whole place a surreal effect. We wandered around after breakfast visiting the various parts of the camp, playing games to see who could identify the various nations flags that were flying above each group. We couldn't figure out Malaysia's and almost everyone we asked, also didn't know. One of the guards joked to us that it is the new combination Egyptian/American flag. With its stripes of red and white and a blue square in the upper left corner carrying a moon and a star, the joke was almost believable. The Japanese were set up on the edge of the camp with tents organized in neat rows, and surrounded by amazing photographic equipment. They also had signs saying "Do not touch" and the night before they had already staked out with ropes their own area for viewing. I found it really interesting how everyone wanted to claim their part of the desert and section it off.
Around 6am more buses began to roll in. Many of them had driven all the way through the night from Cairo or started at 3:30am from the closest tourist town on the coast, Marsa Martrouh. The President of Egypt arrived in his helicopter just before the eclipse began at 11:20 am, but the roads to the plateau had been closed to everyone else since about 8am.
I must say, that before the eclipse began, I did wonder a couple of times, why I had come to the desert to camp out with 4,000 people (later to be joined by 4,000 more) all to experience something that would last for only four minutes. But after the long morning of waiting and chatting with my new found friends, we decided on a patch of ground, put down our mat in the now burning sun and I lay down as if I was at the beach. There was a slight wind to offset the heat of the sun and I felt a real sense of calm. People were gathered across the desert in small groups, mostly quiet and hushed. Then at about 11:20 a cheer went up. Although everything around us appeared to be normal, through the special glasses we could see that the moon had begun to eat a small bite out of the sun. For the next forty five minutes I alternated between watching the light change around me and looking through the glasses at the evolving orange half sun turning to crescent.
And then it began to get cold. Although it was still light, the heat was not there any more. And someone pointed out that we could see the star Venus shining bright in the sky. I stared at my friends and the light illuminating them had changed to a kind of horror movie light. I had never seen such a cold, strange light outdoors before. And yet it still wasn't dark. The sun was almost completely covered but its crescent of light was enough to keep us in daylight until suddenly that crescent disappeared and night descended in "one fell swoop". I couldn't believe it. Darkness and cold surrounded me but up above, now safe to look at without my glasses was the most beautiful ring of light I had ever seen. It was a beautiful white light glowing around a perfect dark circle. And almost involuntarily, I stood up. It was a sense of awe that filled me, one couldn't help but feel touched inside by this beautiful light. The only word I can think of to describe it is "transformation". I think before hand, I expected that the experience was going to be all about darkness but in fact it is really all about light. I glanced up a second time to see this awe inspiring sight and then stopped knowing that I couldn't take any more chances.
The light that emerged from the other side of the sun, was not the same as the disappearing light of the eclipse. Instead it was a white light that made colors, particularly the red color, glow. And again, it was a kind of light I had never seen before.I sat back down and watched as my natural world began to appear again, but with a new identity. And as everyone began to pick up and prepare for lunch as the sun returned to normalcy, I felt that I had been changed by this experience in a way that I could never have anticipated. It's an event that changes one's being in a way that one will never forget.