On our first trip into the Sahara, we traveled from the edge by camel for a few hours into the desert. Our guide, a barefoot Berber, suggested we scamper up a nearby dune to watch the sun set while he made dinner. I thought the food would be horrible, sandy, cold or weird, but it was in fact the most delicious tagine I had ever eaten. The flat disks of bread started out fresh, but were dry as crackers by the end of our meal due to the extreme dryness of the desert, which steals all the moisture from everything.

Our tent was made of camel hair, and was dark olive green. The night was so perfect, we moved our bed outside onto the sand and slept under the stars. The entire sky was stars — there was only bright stars and dim stars and bright galaxies and dim galaxies — so many stars that you couldn’t see any black space between.

The Milky Way was rising as we drifted off to sleep. I woke up hours later, and it was directly overhead, mostly filling the sky. The galaxy felt sometimes like a ceiling just 10 feet over my head and sometimes like a blanket actually covering me.