It shuts off the better half of the sky, the zenith.
"America To-day, Observations and Reflections"
William Archer
It was a very quiet world just now; the sun was only a little over the zenith.
"The Princess Pocahontas"
Virginia Watson
In the upper half of this Circle, or here on the visible plane, we know that in the physiological history of man and of all living things there is first the embryonic or prenatal state, then birth; and as life, like a sun, rises in its new-born power toward the zenith, there is childhood, youth, and maturity; and then, as it passes the zenith on its way to the horizon, there is decline, old age, and, finally, death; and as a scientific possibility we have in the lower half of the Circle, in Hades or the Otherworld of the Celts and of all peoples, corresponding processes between death and a hypothetical but logically necessary re-birth.
"The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries"
W. Y. Evans Wentz