Also Enchanting

One of the nights shortly after leaving Burgos, Sofia, Flo, and I are camped out in a field.  We didn't set up our tents because the sky was perfectly clear.  The night turned out to be also terribly cold and we all ended up huddled together.  Sofia actually crawled into my sleeping bag in the morning.  But that wasn't the enchanting part. 

As the sky got darker and darker, more and more stars appeared.  I've always heard of this moment in traveler's stories.  They get to a place where the brightly lit human world is so withdrawn that the sky unveils it's nocturnal glories.  But I had never seen it before, and I had never suspected it would be so breath-taking, even though they all say it is.  Stars and stars and more stars!  Bright, distinct stars and clumps of hazy glowing stars.  Stars that twinkled, stars that fell.  They pierced the dark with a million points of brilliance.  No wonder men have always watched them, counted them, mapped them, told stories of them.  I could scarcely bear to shut my eyes to fall asleep.  And when I woke up in the night, with Flo skootched close on one side and Sofia breathing deeply on the other, I just stared at the stars.  I was alone (relatively), it was dark and still and cold, and I could not get bored of the sky.  Oddly enough, I didn't feel small, compared to that vast expanse.  I felt at the center of it.  I felt like the sole audience of a universal show, blessed to have the perfect view.  The stars, they loved me.  And I loved them.