Night fell quickly, the vast cold sky opened out over the dark earth. And then the stars appeared, thousands of stars stopped motionless in space. The man with the rifle who led the group called to Nour and showed him the tip of the Little Dipper, the lone star known as Cabri, and on the other side of the constellation, Kochab, the blue. To the east, he showed Nour the bridge where five stars shone: Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Fecda. In the far-eastern corner, barely above the ash-coloured horizon, Orion had just appeared with Alnilam, leaning slightly to one side like the mast of a boat. He knew all the stars, he sometimes called them strange names that were like the beginning of a story. Then he showed Nour the route they would take the next day, as if the lights blinking on in the sky plotted the course that men must
follow on earth. There were so many stars! The desert night was full of those sparks pulsing faintly as the wind came and went like a breath. It was a timeless land. Removed from human history perhaps, a land where nothing else could come to be or die, as if it were already beyond other lands, at the pinnacle of earthly existence. The men often watched the stars, the vast white swath that is like a sandy bridge over the earth. They talked a little, smoking rolled kif leaves; they told each other stories of journeys, rumours of the wars with the Christians, of reprisals. Then they listened to the night. – J.M.G. Le Clezio, Desert
Oh how I wished I had JMG Le Clezio with me all those starry nights in the desert! To lie on the powdery soft sand of the Sahara, under the stars of the Northern hemisphere on a moonless night and have such a man with the gift of words tell me about the stars above us!
We are now at the most southern edge of the bulge of Africa and last night we saw, for the first time, there, sitting proudly anchored in the black velvet sky, the five distinctive stars of the Southern Cross! I felt like giving a whoop of joy and throwing my arms up to greet this old friend!
Up to now the sky has been somewhat alien to me – like an unattainable beauty that keeps itself distant and reserved. Every night I would look up and search for one star, one part of a constellation that I knew, that knew me. But every night it was as if the sky was reluctant to allow me to reach out to it and read it. Yet, whilst on the Camino I felt such a strong affinity with the Northern Hemisphere stars. Perhaps it was just that walking under the Milky Way, that amazing “vast white swath that is like a sandy bridge over the earth” that JMG speaks of, one could not help but feel enveloped in its splendour, covered in its magnificence. Perhaps it was that the stars were so much clearer – ironically in a Europe where there are organisations fighting for 'black nights' (– for the sake of children who have never experienced a completely black night, due to the many inhabited and electrically lit built up areas.), but here in the desert it was nature itself drawing a fine gossamer veil of sand particles and dust clouds over its starry skies. Even on a moonless night in heart of the Sahara I was disappointed in the number of stars. They were there, of course, but they were kept hidden from us and apart from the ever-faithful sisters, the Pleiades, the flashy three stars of Orion's belt boasting its stellar strenght, and of course whilst in the Dogons, the beautiful bright jewel, Cirius, reminding the people from the Dogon that it is still there, hiding and protecting Cirius B – until 2027 when it will step aside for a brief moment and reveal their unique god – as it does every sixty years.
But it was last night, when I sat on the beach, there where the outgoing tide still laps at the line of shells it had pushed out earlier, away from the light of the bonfire and the gleaming ebony bodies of the drummers, that I looked up and saw my childhood friend. I had wondered how far south we had to be to see the Southern Hemisphere stars that I grew up with and somehow I had not expected to start seeing them so early. But there is the Southern Cross and suddenly I feel at home!
This is the sky I know. This is my Africa.
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