By Paul Majendie
Reuters

LONDON (July 18) - Take to Concorde for the flight of a lifetime and you can chase next month's eclipse of the sun across the sky at supersonic speed.

Steam down to western England on the elegant Orient Express train and enjoy night turning into day for the last time this century on August 11.

On the eclipse's path across Europe and Asia until it peters out in the Bay of Bengal, the picture is the same -- hoteliers cashing in, police warning of traffic chaos, and doomsday merchants predicting the end of the world before the Millennium.

Designer Paco Rabanne fears his next fashion show may be his last -- because Russia's Mir space station will crash down and destroy the haute couture capital Paris.

The fireball is coming on August 11, just as the 16th century French seer Nostradamus predicted, says Rabanne.

''I've brought forward my haute couture collection and told all my employees -- don't be in Paris on August 11, stay home, be far from Paris,'' he said.

France's champagne capital of Reims is bubbling -- because it is set to attract a flood of astronomers.

''It's unbelievable, we have no idea where we are going to put them,'' said organiser Florence Levy. ''Every hotel in the city has been full for the past year.''

Turkey is seizing the chance to give a much needed boost to its flagging $8 billion tourist industry. It has been hit hard this year by a spate of bomb attacks following the capture of Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan.

''All hotels across the eclipse region have already been booked up,'' an official from the tourism ministry said.

All Hungarian hotels in the shadow zone are fully booked for the day despite a 30 percent ''eclipse surcharge.''

Parliament axed an opposition proposal to have a national holiday on August 11, but many companies will still stay closed for the day as they expect most to take the day off anyway.

Police fear the ''dark day of summer'' could offer criminals a perfect opportunity.

''One can empty a bank in two minutes. Pickpockets will also have a good harvest, warned Lieutenant-Colonel Tibor Szilagyi of the National Police Road Safety Department.

''We'll also have to be prepared for self-proclaimed prophets preaching the end of the world and the possible panic that could trigger,'' he said.

But the Germans have not yet been gripped by the eclipse fever that is sweeping Britain.

Munich expects up to 40,000 to attend an eclipse party featuring dancers from Africa, Asia and Latin America in the park around the 1972 Olympic Stadium -- but Bayern Munich soccer team get more than that at an average league game at the ground.

ZDF public television is chartering a special plane to transmit pictures from 40,000 feet.

Opticians in Bavaria -- and across Europe -- are warning against damage to eyes and special eclipse sunglasses are already on sale in Munich shops. Hospitals are on standby.

The total eclipse starts off the coast of Nova Scotia and travels at about 1,500 miles an hour across the Atlantic.

It makes landfall at Britain's Isles of Scilly and then passes over France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan.

Birds will stop singing and return to their nests. Temperatures will plummet dramatically, a strong breeze will rise. Earth experiences a bizarre twilight and the horizon shows all the colours of dawn.

Weather experts say Britain faces only a 45 percent chance of witnessing the eclipse in its totality because of likely cloud covering. That has not deterred four million people from planning to converge on Cornwall and Devon in western England.

Cornish women were advised nine months ago not to get pregnant in case the roads were jammed on Eclipse Day.

Giant boulders have been rolled into place around revered archaeological sites for fear of invasion by New Age ravers.

Well-heeled passengers are paying $2,350 each to chase the eclipse on the Concorde supersonic airliner.

Arch Druid Ed Pryn has built a mini-Stonehenge monument in the garden of his bungalow and will be ''marrying'' couples in pagan ceremonies throughout the day.

And those already tired of the hype surrounding the two minutes and six seconds of darkness should reflect on the words of author Virginia Woolf.

She was converted into an instant and fervent heliophile when witnessing Britain's last total eclipse on June 29, 1927.

''Suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead,'' she wrote. ''I thought we were like very old people in the birth of the world.''

''We were bitterly cold. I should say that the cold had increased as the light went down ...Then -- it was all over until 1999.''