Will the Eclipse will help the Connecticut Yankee...
...overcome his difficulty avoiding execution?
NASA’s eclipse-chasing jets find amazing images of solar eclipses
“Well, then,” I said, “either I am a lunatic, or something just as awful has happened. Now tell me, honest and true, where am I?”
“In King Arthur’s Court.”
I waited a minute, to let that idea shudder its way home, and then said:
“And according to your notions, what year is it now?”
“528—nineteenth of June.”
I felt a mournful sinking at the heart, and muttered: “I shall never see my friends again—never, never again. They will not be born for more than thirteen hundred years yet.”
I seemed to believe the boy, I didn’t know why. Something in me seemed to believe him—my consciousness, as you may say; but my reason didn’t. My reason straightway began to clamor; that was natural. I didn’t know how to go about satisfying it, because I knew that the testimony of men wouldn’t serve—my reason would say they were lunatics, and throw out their evidence. But all of a sudden I stumbled on the very thing, just by luck. I knew that the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the sixth century occurred on the 21st of June, A.D. 528, O.S., and began at 3 minutes after 12 noon. I also knew that no total eclipse of the sun was due in what to me was the present year—i.e., 1879. So, if I could keep my anxiety and curiosity from eating the heart out of me for forty-eight hours, I should then find out for certain whether this boy was telling me the truth or not.
Wherefore, being a practical Connecticut man, I now shoved this whole problem clear out of my mind till its appointed day and hour should come, in order that I might turn all my attention to the circumstances of the present moment, and be alert and ready to make the most out of them that could be made.
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