I dreamed in a bed of stars.
The regolith beneath me was baked in the Turkana sun and sifted like fine flour by the winds. Earlier that day, our overland truck had sunk into these sands as we tried to cross a dried riverbed. It had been difficult to escape the sand, but now I wasn't trying to escape. I let myself sink deeper until I felt I was floating on the surface of a great lake. If I stayed still, maybe I would sink further. The sand above me would compress into rock with the weight of new sands that the winds delivered daily. Maybe tens of thousands of years later the same winds would cut through the rock and reveal my form to some fortunate archaeologist who would try to unravel the mystery of me-- just as contemporary archaeologists struggle with “Turkana Boy” and other early hominid fossils that were discovered in this area. I wasn't quite ready to turn into a fossil yet, but my mind was on the people who came before me.
I had been warned about scorpions, but Scorpius had disappeared below the horizon with the Sun and I now had Orion walking across the sky to protect me. At least that familiar form was easy to spot in the sky. It was surprisingly difficult to recognize my other friends. There seemed exactly as many stars above me as the grains of sand below. With no light from the ground, the clouds threatening the beginning of the rainy season became crawling black ink which obscured familiar patterns. As the clouds twisted and rolled, stars shown through broken patches creating strange new visions above. Perhaps ancient shaman saw these new patterns as direct messages from the heavens. Of course, stars themselves care nothing for the future of us short-lived humans. However, how we choose to see the stars and our place in relationship to them clearly reveals something to us about ourselves. In my city of Dallas, the city lights are so bright that about only three stars are still visible at night. In my planetarium, the star patterns are easily recognizable and controllable. I make them rise and set at my command. I control time and space. The ancient's sky was clearer than a modern city but not as predictable as the stars in my planetarium. Perhaps the sky seemed more alive.
At just a few degrees north of the equator, the walking path of the stars seemed to be straight up and straight down rather than the arc path in my northern home. The north star around which all my familiars seemed to dance in their circular paths (and around which many of their stories literally revolve) was not visible. I was drifting in the sea of stars without my anchor and felt lost and out of control in the unfamiliar sky.
Our human ancestors from this spot near the equator would not have had an obvious northern nor southern star guide consistently above the horizon either. In the North, stars around the pole seemed especially important because they never set as the Earth turned. They seemed eternal and consistent. On the equator, stars near the poles disappeared. They had shorter and slower paths in the sky and might seem less important than the stars which rise directly in the East and take the longest path through the top of the sky to the West. Likely, our ancestors from this area looked for ways to mark East and West rather than to find North.
Today, Mintaka—one of the belt stars of Orion—comes very close to rising exactly in the East and setting in the West. Coincidentally, Mintaka rises opposite the sunset very near the December solstice when the Sun sets at its furthest south along the western horizon. Half the Earth's revolution later, Mintaka sets at the same time as the Sun sets at its most northerly position along the horizon. The position of Mintaka can currently be used as both a calendar marker and a direction indicator. If I were to make a stone circle, I would likely line up stones to help track Mintaka. Because of the precession or “wobble” of the Earth's axis, the stars that rise exactly in the East change over time. Archaeologists who stumble upon my stone circle thousands of years from now would have a difficult time discerning its use.
Undetermined centuries ago, a stone arrangement was built some kilometers away from the current shores of Lake Turkana. It is difficult to determine the exact age, but it is generally agreed that the stones predate the current culture's migration to this area. The purpose of their alignment is lost. It has been replaced with often repeated religious myth of dancing people laughing at the devil and being turned to stone. In good years, Turkana elders require the sacrifice of a donkey, a goat and a camel at the stones, but it has been many years since the people here have had bounty enough to sacrifice.
Instead of a circle, the stones are arranged in what seemed to be a narrow arrow head. An observer standing at the point of the arrow and looking towards the base would be facing due West. Three stones are lined up near the base and perhaps would show the setting location of prominent stars during different times of years in the ancient past. Across the “arrow head” is another crossing alignment of stones. Perhaps these indicated the solstice settings of the Sun? I don't know. My tour group only had a very limited and prescribed number of minutes to spend at the stones. We had a time-schedule to keep.
People had traveled from around the world to view the rare hybrid eclipse and we could not afford to be late. They knew the precise time that the Moon would be lined up with the Sun at the specific latitude and longitude. A group of astronomers from Russia and the Ukraine had a Soviet era map of Turkana where they had traced the predicted boundaries of the Moon's shadow during totality. The stone circle was two kilometers too far south. Our computers and iPads and GPS units and watches all told us that we needed to leave.
People more expert than myself told me that the moon would be just slightly too far away to completely cover the Sun at first. It would appear as slightly smaller circle surrounded by a ring of the Sun's fire in an annular eclipse. However, as the Earth rotates and our position on the planet becomes closer to the Moon, the Moon would become visually large enough to completely cover the Sun in a total eclipse for less than fifteen seconds. GPS devices indicated our exact location. Telescopes with solar filters were aligned towards the West for the exact location of the eclipse. Ipads were used to show where bright stars and planets were located which might be revealed when the sky goes dark. Disappointingly, none of my personal electronics seemed to be working, so I just had to watch with my eyes. Cameras and attention was focused in the West while I noticed black rain clouds slid along the horizon in the East.
At exactly the predicted time, the moon's black disk started to obscure the Sun. The unpredictable black clouds began to creep from their hiding places in the eastern horizon. The moon's steady and predictable path in its orbit obscured increasingly more of the Sun's disk making it appear as a giant apple with a bite taken out of it... like a Macintosh advertisement. It would only be a matter of a short time before the moon would completely “eat” the Sun as predicted. But, the cloud creature army was now in full charge across the sky. Black streaks of rain pummeled the eastern horizon. Shock troops of wind picked up the sand and threw it at the delicate telescope lenses as the angry clouds continued their charge towards the Sun. Lightening flashed to the north and the hair on my arms stood in anticipation. Would we see the totality of the Sun's eclipse before this apocalyptic cloud army reached its target?
With five minutes before totality, the clouds had surrounded their target. It wasn't a huge army, just enough to leave the sky clear above our heads, but obscure the Western horizon including the Sun. We saw the evidence of the eclipse as the sky turned a deep ocean blue, but the telescopes couldn't peer through the clouds to verify the cause. At the exact moment of predicted totality, everyone in the crowd made a sound. Some gave a groan of disappointment or anguish. Some gave a cheer. It depended upon how they interpreted what they saw. Then, the clouds parted. Not revealing the Sun where we wanted, but exactly in the place where Venus had previously been hidden in the Sun's glow. We clearly got a glimpse of the brilliant planet reflecting the glow from the hidden sun. Behind us, a rainbow stretched across the sky.
I wonder how the ancient shaman would interpret these events? Would they have correlated eclipse to the rains that came and turned the dry beds into rushing flash floods and overnight adding green leaves to the thorny plants? Would the rains bring enough water this year to give the people bounty? What would their interpretation of the events in the sky reveal to them about their own desires?
For me, the thought of the Stolen Sun, Revealed Venus and the Brilliant Rainbow made me think of love and promise. I thought of Don's heart and my brother's brain and all the things that I can't control nor influence-- no matter how much I desire. I thought of my responsibility as a guide to help others explore without letting my “expertise” get in their way of discovery. I thought of how much time I spend under my controllable stars and how comparably little time I spend under the wild sky.
I think I need to spend more time lucidly dreaming in my bed of stars.
