Nieu Bethesda – part…ugh, I forget!
After our quarts of beer, a plate of lamb and barley and pickled turnips, dessert of risotto with walnuts and local honey, and a bottle of wine, we wandered/staggered/stumbled outside, back to our room. The sky. In the middle of nowhere, there was almost no light pollution, and a new moon to boot. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Thousands more stars than I’d ever looked upon, and the milky way looking positively milky, thick with stars that were so many billions of light years away you couldn’t even tell them apart from each other. Shooting stars, even! Looking up at a sky like that, where the stars reach right down to the horizon, it’s easy to see how people imagined the sky as a dome, pricked with stars. It was easy to see how the sky told a story to the Greeks, how up-there was the natural place to imagine heaven would be for the Christians. Before electricity, before streetlights and stories-tall cities, it would have looked like this for thousands of years, an endless yet perfectly orderly and dependable arch of the stars marching across the sky every night. I was rapt with wonder, until finally I was shaking of cold, and we retreated inside to the electric blanket and hot water bottles.
That sounds positively breathtaking. What a privilege to experience something like that.