Jungle Jim saves the blonde bombshell by recalling the
Information Please, Almanac's prediction of
the total eclipse of the sun (conveniently)
...one minute before it occurs... just in time
to deliver his climactic ultimatum:
'You no lay-ee down weapons...?
Me take-ee way sun!' And the rest,
of course, is campy, cinematic history---
Thus did I begin to romance the grandeur
of the Celestial Clockworks...
and finally (at long, long last)... as foretold in the
tom-toms of our ancient astronomic calendars and
codices, there came to pass along the 45th Parallel
on my seventeenth swing 'round the summer sun, a
total eclipse in my time-space continuum that turned
downtown Dexter into a Mayan Mecca swollen with
sun-worshipping eclipse-chasers offering up
sacrifices of dance and joyful noise... exotic pilgrims
from the Seven Seas posturing their Pentaxes and
Pilgrimatics in a United Nations shutterbug
encampment... a forest of transient tripods---
but on a mile-away farm, I get to feel first-hand the
Apocalyptic Horseman Approach of... TOTALITY,
witness the wondrous and clumsy panic of the
cattle lurching hurriedly for the mid-day barn before
the rapidly falling Old Testament DARK as
confused as any silver-screen headhunters whose
world the gods have damned to annihilation---
and a chill, like the Shadow of Death in this
noon-black midnight, generates (even in me)
an unexpected... God-fearing--- but then
the cows are plodding back to the pasture...
and somewhere... a rooster crows…