En Smakebit På Søndag #8

Smakebiten i dag er fra en bok jeg holder på å lese nå. Boken heter The Strain og er første bok i en trilogi. Den er skrevet av Guillermo del Toro og Chuck Hogan.

Smakebiten er tatt fra side 87, i min utgave av boken, hvor en total solformørkelse beskrives.

As the crescent sun continued to narrow, the complexion of the sky became a strangled violet. The darkness in the west gathered strenght like a silent, windless storm system, spreading  throughout the sky and closing in around the weakened sun, like a great organism succumbing to a corrupting force spreading from within.
   The sun grew perilously thin, the view - through safety glasses - like that of a manhole lid being slid shut high above, sqeezing out the daylight. The crescent blazed white, then turned to silver in its agonal last moments.
   Strange, roving bands of shadow began moving over the ground. Oscillations formed by the refraction of light in the earth's asmosphere - similar to the effect of light moving on the floor of a swimming pool - writhed like shadowy snakes at the corner of one's vision. These ghostly tricks of light made the hair stand on the back of every viewer's neck.
   The end came quickly. The last throes were chilling, intense, the crescent shrinking to a curved line, a slicing scar in the sky, then fragmenting into individual pearls of fiery white, representing the last of the sun's rays seeping through the deepest valleys along the lunar surface. These beads winked and vanished in rapid succession, snuffed out like a dying candle flame drowned  in its own black wax. The crimson-colored band that was the chromosphere, the thin upper atmosphere of the sun, flared a precious, final few seconds - and then the sun was gone.
   Totality. 

Flere smakebiter her.