I thought I heard crickets. Then I listened more closely and realized I was imagining them. It was silent enough in the desert for the brain to create it's own white noise.
You didn't have to go too far from the farm-house to be totally free of artificial light. This was my favorite thing to do in the hours of relaxation, between tea-time and dinner: walk out along the hillside, sit on a boulder, turn off the headlamp, and let my eyes bounce around the alien constellations of the southern skies for an hour.
High altitude, remoteness and clear desert skies. Possibly the most stars I'd ever seen. The silhouettes of massive cardón cactii loomed above me, reaching like worshippers, and against them I swear I could detect the swirling of the sky.
Up and down the valley, dogs began to bark at one another, miles apart. With every bark there was a distorted echo that rang back from the other end of the quebrada. It was hard telling the echoes from the responses of other dogs.
On one end of the horizon, there was a faint pall of light from the nearest town, probably Humahuaca. Red-and-green waves flowing upward and dissolving into the sky. I immediately had the sensation that this light was the reflection of computer screens on the window of a craft that was floating through space. That's how well-defined the field of the stars was: it revealed that it was three-dimensional.
The Las Diaguitas petroglyphs I had seen earlier that day, at El Pintado, began to take shape in my eyes as imagined constellations. I saw the Jesuit missionary, with arms outstretched, coming in peace. There was the hunter with his lance, of course. There was the "tumi" symbol, which respented a weapon and looked something like this: (-). Largest of all, I saw the butterfly-like symbol for shaman/chief, right down the middle of the Milky Way. The symmetry of these new constellations began to disturb me.
More than once I saw a star blink brightly and then disappear from view. I saw others (had to be satellites) no different from those around them, moving in a slow, straight voyages, swimming across the sea of stars.
As I got up to go inside, I saw the rays of the moonrise reaching over the mountains, like the heralds of an advancing conqueror. The full moon would soon dim the beauty of the stars and illuminate the landscape like it was still dusk. A bat fluttered past my face. Then I heard it, just barely audible in this oppressive ocean of silence: the chirp of one solitary cricket, out in the desert.
