Here's the final installment of our 4-part interview with former Washington Post foreign correspondent Joanne Omang on her girlfriends trip to Turkey.
Q: Talk a little about the special experience of going to Turkey for the full eclipse in March 2006.
A: The rational mind says an eclipse is utterly predictable and lasts maybe four minutes if you’re lucky, so why bother to travel to see one? But the whole event takes about four hours and is truly 
startling and, at a deep level, very eerie.
At first, as the moon begins crossing the sun, the light feels gradually thinner, like winter has come. Each bit of dappled sunlight through tree leaves has an amazing crescent shape, the shape of the light beam coming down.
When the moon at last obscures 
the entire sun, totality is sudden: the sky turns to midnight, the stars come out and what used to be the sun is a ring of fire around a black disk. A cold wind rises. The birds go nuts (they somehow know it’s not a cloud) and all around the horizon it’s suddenly sunset. Everyone who sees it just gasps.
So much to register, so little time! And in your gut, at a level so deep your rational mind has no power over it, a tiny fear arises: what if it doesn’t come back? You know this is silly but there it is. It probably goes back to when we were all lizards. When totality ends and the sun gradually returns to its former glory, you can’t help a small feeling of relief. We survived another one!
Islamic tradition recognizes this unsettling reaction. 
Mohammed told his followers in 632 AD that a solar eclipse was not an omen or the result of anything humans had done but was merely evidence of God’s control over all things. Pray together during an eclipse, he said.
In Turkey I was very lucky to see the March 29, 2006 eclipse at the site in Konya of the tomb of the 12th century Sufi poet and mystic Rumi. His followers are the famed whirling dervishes, and their whirling is a form of prayer: the left hand reaches to the sky and the right toward the earth, and the world revolves as they do. They whirled before, during and after totality, reassuring the rest of us that the earth continued stable on its axis. Any traveler to Turkey should try not to miss seeing the dervishes perform.
