desert night

The last time I did shrooms was about 3 years ago. I was camping with my girlfriend in the Mojave desert in March. We drove about 15 miles up a dirt road to a fairly remote campground and arrived in the late afternoon. We were the only people there, and the silence and arid desolation made us both speak in hushed tones. About an hour before dusk we ate the caps and stems we had (I can't remember how much it was, probably 4 shrooms each?) and hiked up a small hill near the camp to watch the sunset. As the light softened more details came out of the landscape. The colors intensified and we marveled at how the landscape suddenly looked just like photos we had seen of the arid plains of Africa. We began to see the occasional rabbit darting through the bushes, and to hear deer hooves on rocks in the distance. As the sun went down we went back to camp, and then it really hit us. That night Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were in a line up the sky as the sun set. It was the most spectacular star display I have ever seen. It was probably just the drug, but I have never seen Mercury so clearly, to the point where I could feel the actual spatial relationship between where I stood on earth and its relationship to the sun and Mercury, along with all the other planets. haha... so that's what I was pondering, standing there in total awe, feeling dizzy and drunk (we weren't drinking though), while my girlfriend could no longer take it and had to go in the tent and chill out. Suddenly the sun was gone, and things got scary. The sheet of stars above me took on a 3 dimensional pattern, like a quilt that had been thrown over the earth. In the darkness, bushes and pinyon trees took on a hideous, scarred appearance, and I felt like I was standing on the edge of a dying landscape, barely held together in the delicate balance of an atmosphere held down by gravity and the perfect proximity of our planet from the sun. The next few hours I spent huddled around a small fire, listening to coyotes yelp at each other in the distance, and my main emotion was one of terror. The terror eventually weaned away... plants and rocks and the sky became familiar again. The stars were suddenly remote again, so far away and the stillness and quiet became peaceful. I could see light on the horizon from Las Vegas, over 100 miles away on the other side of whole mountain ranges. I went to bed and slept hard that night.