When you tell welding supply shopkeepers you want grade-13 glass, they are momentarily impressed. Grade 13 in your helmet means you have an awesome, flame-throwing oxy-welder at home, and leads to questions like, "What are you doing, mate, building a battleship in your backyard?" For a moment they don't notice your accent or your Capri pants or the fact you came in on a bike.

But then you tell them you don't want protective plastic for the glass, because there won't be any sparks; you're just staring at the sun. And they figure out you're one of those eclipse wankers who've been bugging them all week.

It takes two hours to fly from Sydney to Adelaide, where a million of South Australia's 1.4 million people live. The rest of the state is small towns, farms, a few coastal wineries and endless outback, the driest region of the driest continent in the world. It takes six hours to drive from the city to the inland Woomera Prohibited Area, where we'll view the eclipse.

We travel on a two-lane highway, one lane north and one south. The heat mirage makes passing scary, as there always appears to be something tremulous ahead of us in the oncoming lane. The best is overtaking "road trains," thirty-six-wheel Mad-Maxian behemoths so long that they're articulated in three places.

As the hours pass, the dirt becomes more and more cracked, showing more iron oxide content, until it becomes as blood-red as Mars. The tallest plants rise no higher than my knee. We pass the bones of kangaroo roadkill, and spot a few live emus running alongside the road like scruffy ostriches. We are blinded by sunlight reflected off vast dry salt lakes, white expanses that are the deposits of the ancient oceans that used to cover this huge, flat plain.

Woomera Prohibited Area is a military-owned test site, about 127,000 square kilometers in size. In its heyday it was used to test rockets, artillery, bombs, and experimental jets, and 6,000 people once lived here. Now Woomera is mostly ghost-town, probably the only village of 300 with an airport big enough to land any plane in the world. In addition to a last few research projects, it is also home to the Woomera Detention Centre, where Australia's conservative government keeps refugees from Afghanistan and other godforsaken places in godforsaken isolation, to show that it's tough on non-white immigration. There are occasional protests here, but it is a hard place to sustain any activity for very long. The military owns all the water and shelter.

We check into the ELDO Hotel, a complex named for its previous owners, the European Launcher Development Organization. Woomera is filling up with geeks: a large NASA contingent, British Astronomical Society scientists, and privately funded coronaphiles like us.

We mill about the one-kilometer-square town, looking at the decommissioned rockets and scramjets on display, trying to find the pub, double-A batteries, and any semblance of vegetarian food. Eclipses happen in random and generally remote spots, so there's never enough logistical support for the throngs who descend.

There are lectures to attend, the usual celebrity shuttle astronauts and astronomers, but we (Justine and I, and our friends Sean Williams and Kim Selling, another sf-writer-and-genre-scholar couple) head to Spud's Roadhouse for dinner. We catch sunset at a huge salt lake with a conical mountain rising from it and drive back slowly so as not to kill kangaroos, which forage at dusk and dawn. That night, Sean runs star-finding software from his and Kim's room while Justine and I are outside; he orients us by walkie-talkie to find Jupiter, the Pleiades, an upside-down Orion. (We brought walkie-talkies. Geeky or what?)

I have never seen this many stars. The sky is absolutely cloudless and without background light. For the first eleven months of this year, Woomera has had less than an inch of total rain, and the nearest town with a population of even 1,000 is hundreds of kilometers away. You can see a car coming ten minutes before it passes, its headlights silently sweeping the plain like some alien visitation.

The next day, the tour bus takes us into the Prohibited Area at about 3PM, waved past by military police with machine guns. The bus is fronted by a giant 'roo-bar, armor to protect it from high-speed marsupial collisions. It's full of bottled water and tourists. I overhear the reunions of rich eclipse freaks: "Haven't seen you since Venezuela in '96. Bloody good corona on that one. But the catering was awful!"

We pass the site for CANGAROO, the Combined Australia-Nippon Gamma-ray Observation/Orientation project. The multi-mirror telescopes reflect the red earth and cloudless blue sky upside down and in facets. The Japanese are the big users for the WPA since the cold war ended, as the US no longer needs a testing range bigger than Nevada. A Japanese consortium is developing the suborbital Tokyo-to-NY-in-two-hours rocket plane here, which will one day make my trans-hemispheric lifestyle more common. The latest prototype disintegrated just a few months ago, I remember reading in the news.

The UN is also here, testing international standards for munitions storage. Little Potempkin villages rise up from the desert, the houses constructed to the building codes of various nations. A fake arms depot sits a few kilometers away, as much as seventy-five tons of munitions stacked into it and deliberately detonated every now and then. The participating nations then take a look at how much damage their houses sustained, and rewrite their zoning laws accordingly, one hopes. (We are assured by the public information officer that the sheep we've noticed are shooed away prior to these tests.)

The highlight of the tour is a 1960s rocket launch pad, located on the shore of a huge salt lake. Eight-story rockets took off from here, British efforts before they joined the European Space Agency. The salt lake is blackened with craters from practice bombing runs.

Finally, we arrive at the dismantled town of Koolymilka, which is in the dead center of the path of totality. It's about 5:30, and the wind has settled down to a dusty 15 miles per hour from the west, where the sun, in early summer, is still high. First contact is at 6:40, totality lasts for thirty seconds at 7:40, and a partially eclipsed sunset comes at 8:20.

There is time to have a beer.

We are pleased with our splendid isolation. Far to the east in Lyndhurst, a town with a non-eclipse population of 28, about 20,000 people are expected for an all-day rave and musical festival. The town of Ceduna to our west, where the path of totality makes landfall, expects about 10,000. But Ceduna, tragically, is forecast to have five-eighths cloud cover this evening. People who've travelled from across the world may wind up seeing nothing but gray. Already, there are reports of a mass exodus to higher inland ground. But we're here, smug behind barbed wire, on a freshly bulldozed red plain, our horizon broken only by tour busses and the comparative luxury of one beer stand, a sausage barbeque, and twenty-seven portaloos for some 250 people.

Most of the observers have equipment far more complex than our little rectangles of welding glass. A mismatched army of tripods stretches the length of the observation area, holding cameras of every description. Non-scientists are warned to cover their auto flashes with black tape, or risk burning out delicate optical gizmos and bringing down the wrath of jet-lagged graduate students.

We four go to the unpopulated limit of the chained-off area (but no further, in case any unexploded ordnance happens to be lying around). We stand there drinking, eating, practicing with our welder's glass, applying chapstick against the desert wind, and gradually turning a dusty red from the waist down.

And quietly wondering if this is really going to be anywhere near as cool as we've been telling ourselves it will be.

First contact arrives.

Right on schedule (based on readings from Justine's Buffy the Vampire Slayer digital watch) a miniscule nibble is taken from the bottom left of the sun. Through grade-13 welder's glass, you can't see much of the normal world. Even staring into a hundred-watt bulb, you can only make out the individual tendrils of glowing filaments. The sun is reduced to a greenish ball about as big as a dime held at arm's length, no bigger than the moon. Looking at first contact, you can't see the horizon, or anything else through the glass, just a slightly impaired circle, the black occultation encroaching slowly across it.

Not in itself amazing, but you do know it's the sun. And it's being eaten.

About half an hour in, the light starts to change. The rusty reds of the desert are dragged down into a burnt orange, the blue of the sky deepening. Faces take on a benevolent rusty glow, as if the Mars dust is seeping into our pores. Reality is being stretched slowly out of shape, just beneath the speed of perception, as gradually as a minute hand moves. You have to close your eyes for a solid minute and then open them to register the tiny shifts. And the moment your brain is readjusted to the wrong lighting, the world gets a bit weirder still.

Forty minutes after first contact--twenty minutes before totality--I go into a portaloo. (Don't want to miss that thirty-second totality after all.) The ventilation grill in is full of tiny holes, which cast a grid of shadows. Each hole acts like a pinhole camera, and hundreds of tiny eclipses deform across the surface of my shirt. Back at the viewing site, Sean and I make a proper pinhole camera out of two pages of notebook paper, which renders a tiny eclipse, three-quarters complete. Then we notice that our shadows look wrong. The straight lines of our arms and legs are mottled and deformed, like shadows cast in a leafy forest. The crescent sun is no longer shining parallel light, making everything messy and weird: reality stretching even further. It's darker, and the temperature has noticeably dropped, as rapidly as always in the desert when the sun disappears.

A jeep with UN markings pulls up. Real-live peacekeepers in blue uniforms here to watch with us.

The sun is still too bright for the naked eye. When I take a glance--knowing from the view through my welder's glass (and the Buffy watch) that it's ninety-five percent gone--the spot burned onto my vision has the same crescent shape as the pinhole camera image. The world has turned a sort of colorized sepia.

Kim spots a group of kangaroos bounding along behind us. They're confused, fooled by the waning light into thinking it's dusk. Or maybe they sense something weird is happening, and have just decided to meet the end of the world on the run.

With about a minute left to go, the wind doubles in strength, driving into our faces. The "cold-core mini-cyclone" has arrived. As the shadow of the moon sweeps across the earth, a column of cold air is created. This cold air falls, blowing outward from the shadow, hitting you in the face just before totality and from behind just afterwards. This mini-storm has traveled at about two thousand miles per hour from central Africa, across the Indian Ocean, and now here, creating shock waves in its path that can be measured for hours after its passage.

Two hundred miles to our west in Ceduna, this cold-core mini-cyclone has already worked a bit of magic for the faithful. The plummeting temperature and descending air column has parted the clouds at just the right moment, revealing totality to 10,000 relieved observers.

Now it's our turn.

Stretched too thin, reality finally snaps.

Drop the glass. You can look at the sun. You can look right at the sun with bare eyes. That's because it's not white anymore: it's black. The sun is black, with a brilliant ring of fire clinging to its edge, sparkling through those imperfections where some deep valley on the moon has let a shaft of sunlight past.

The sun-moon has become a huge, fiery black pupil hanging in the sky, staring at us.

The sky directly overhead is deep purple. Around the horizon is a pink band, like sunset but equally bright to our left and right. In front of us, the black sun (I repeat: the sun is black) is surrounded by a circle of dark sky. Another dark circle is directly behind us. That's because we're standing in the middle of a shadow, a conical tunnel almost 200,000 miles long that starts at the moon and ends just over our shoulders a few thousand miles into space. That blackness behind us is the eclipse darkening the desert as it zooms onward. We're in a long, dark shadow-ray that, this close to sundown, is just glancing across surface of the Earth.

Quit thinking about this and look at the black sun! You only have thirty seconds.

Sean is jumping up and down and everyone is generally freaking out. The colors are all wrong and the wind has suddenly died as the cold-core mini-cyclone dumps air straight down on us. The already martian desert has been transported to another solar system, one that has a black hole hanging in the sky.

(I can still see the black sun in my head, without any of that signal loss that comes when you replay memories too many times. I can see it perfectly. Not-quite-believingly, but perfectly.)

Then a screamingly painful bolt of light comes from the lower-left corner of the moon-sun. For a couple of seconds I can see the black moon and sun start to separate, then I have to put up my welding glass again.

It's over. That was thirty seconds? It seemed like either much more or much less.

The line of scientists is clapping. The three-year-old kid who was sitting next to Justine and I on the bus is crying. He's not blind, we find out later, just unhappy about the sun having turned suddenly black. Sean also describes it as frightening.

The sun starts to come back, and as in any trip to a new place, the return seems much faster. It feels like only minutes before the sun is setting, cut off on the bottom by the Earth, the upper right gouged out by the moon. It takes the shape of a Vespa scooter seen from the side, then a shark's fin. When the tip of the fin is all that's left, we drop the glass again, and see something quite strange: sunset as a tiny point, as if the sun were a laser focused on our eyes.

An amazing number of things have to go right for a human being to see totality.

In history, a few folks were lucky enough to chance upon one. Or unlucky enough: some of them were routed from the field of battle, many were blinded, and a few simply dropped dead like Emperor Louis of Bavaria in 840 AD. Although the Maya and the Stonehenge builders could predict solstices, lunar eclipses and the like, solar eclipses have somewhat trickier math. The first predicted observations were made only in the nineteenth century, and only by well-funded scientists.

Of course, we live in an age of tremendous relative wealth, where perhaps a fifth of the planet's population has the wherewithal to travel to a path of totality at some point in their lives. The once arcane information is free on the internet, and a piece of welder's glass costs all of two US dollars.

But the truly astounding thing is how unlikely naked-eye totalities are to begin with. If the sun were a million miles farther away, or the moon only a few thousand miles closer, totality wouldn't occur at all. The long tunnel of shadow would end just before reaching the Earth's surface. Therefore, the sun's outline would still be visible, blindingly bright, and you'd never get to drop the welder's glass. (This happens naturally when the moon is a bit farther away in its orbit, producing an "annular" eclipse.) The same result would happen if the moon were slightly smaller or the sun a bit bigger. Likewise, if any of the reverse were true, totality would be much less beautiful. The moon would completely cover the sun, not revealing that narrow band of corona that turns a black spot into an electric eye. Finally, if the moon's orbital offset from Earth's was much larger than its current 5 degrees, eclipses would occur only every thousand years or so, rather than every eighteen months.

But everything--the distances, orbits, and sizes of Earth, moon, and sun--is perfectly balanced. If there were ten thousand populated planets in the galaxy, tourists would still come to Earth for the eclipses.

I had none of Sean's or the three-year-old's sense of terror. For me, totality was more . . . satisfying, like a last piece in a puzzle or a bit of perfectly synchronized clockwork falling into place. In the cab back to Adelaide airport, I get none of my usual post-vacation doubt. (Did I see enough here? Do enough? Was this really worth the time and money?) I have no worries about my experience of totality, that anxiety of seeing the Mona Lisa or Ella Fitzgerald in person and wondering if you've appreciated them enough. I'm not even annoyed that I forgot to look directly overhead in mid-totality for stars coming out. I feel sated.

Well, maybe not completely.

Sean and Kim and Justine and I do plan to be in Turkey in March 2006. The totality will last a whopping four minutes and some. And it does seem a shame to be already down here in the southern hemisphere and miss the Antarctic eclipse in November 2003. There's this Russian research station right in the path of totality, and someone's probably already selling tickets.