The darkness was tomb-black. Through all of our breathing, the spell thickened as a needle of light stole across the chamber's floor. The mind is a strange thing, hovering between past and future, aware of its own ability to draw meaning from an occurrence. As the glow lit our shadowy faces, we smiled and murmured with pleasure, but it was stronger emotion that brimmed my eyes.
To catch that brief occurrence, they built a cantilevered stone chamber and covered it with a mound of earth. Above the entrance to the passage from the outside world, they fixed a narrow aperture aligned to the winter solstice.
Modern astronomy tells us precisely how this happens. During the year, the sun's path across our sky is altered by the elliptical shape of the Earth's orbit. In the northern hemisphere, as winter deepens, the sun seems to drift south.
I was part of one of the regular tours for those people not lucky enough to win a golden ticket to enter Newgrange during the actual solstice. Arguably, my experience wasn't real. But the dark chamber was real.
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