T. L. Hughes
Groggily I stepped out of the back into the open night air. There wasn’t a human sound other than that of the soft wind in my eardrums for tens of hundreds of miles, and the incredible beauty of the lighted sky hit me with a cracking wake-up punch that lifted my senses to an everlasting high. It was a sky so completely illuminated by eons and eons of just arriving fresh starlight. I had never seen so many glimmering lights before. Every star ever identified by the history of mankind; every nebulous cloud; every faint light that had ever graced the face of our earth . . . all of it now stood above us in a complete canvas exhibit of the endless heavens. The vapor-like gases that formed the outer stretches of our galaxy dispersed among the stars in a cloudlike line. We stood out there in sheer amazement for at least a half hour, pivoting in circles as we looked up, our feet imprinting the salt flats that we stood on. When I tired of standing, I lay down on the desert floor. I identified the big sauce pan of the dipper and followed it across to Polaris like I was a little kid again. We guessed possible constellations; we discerned the distinct yellow light of planets compared to the blue light of the stars; we saw distant blinking satellites crossing the star dust and tens of shooting stars that dove toward the horizon all at once. This was the night sky before the electric light had ever been invented, the sky of the great oceans and the Sahara, the sky of Antarctica and Siberia, the sky of our past, the sky where men of long ago sat around crackling fires and talked of what it all might be . . . those crazy blinking lights that came out every night and revolved around that single shimmering light that pointed due north; these were the night fires of the gods.
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