Around the world, inside the world

I’m lying on a dune, doing a butterfly with my arms. Up and down, up and down. The sand is softer than silk on my skin, and it cools and warms as my arms move.
It’s completely dark, that perfect darkness of solitude that a city inhabitant can only dream of. The sky is… A shooting star! A what – fourth, fifth one I’ve spotted tonight? I’ve never seen any shooting stars before. On the other hand, I never found myself lying on the dune in Sahara desert, watching the utterly beautiful starlit sky and listening to my friends humming some popular tune nearby.
Yet I wish everything and everyone around was silent, and I could sink into this sand and this darkness. Every sound, laugh, or move disturbs me; my body and soul are tuned to the silence and the calm of the desert.
The fire is extinguishing in the camp. The drums and chants are now gone, replaced by the dreamy chatter. They are my tribe tonight, these kids most of whom I barely know even that we spent over a month together. On a moderately-sized ship it's still easy to be total strangers. Six hundred people is quite a lot, after all.
It's called the MV Explorer, the ship; she's white and blue and seven-decked. She carries a bunch of idealists together with a bunch of academics who're trying to give them an idea of the world beyond the borders of their countries. The program, Semester at Sea, takes the students on a journey around the world while they study aboard a ship. That's how I ended up in Morocco. Our eighth port.
The train from Casablanca was horrid. Old, not a bit air-conditioned, and taking twice the time it's supposed to. I hopped on the train with a bunch of people headed to Marrakech, their final destination being the mouth of the desert, far over the Atlas mountains. I didn't plan to go. But the next morning after a sleepless night in a stuffy hotel room I found myself in the small bus headed east, and now here I am. The journey was exhausting, seven or eight hours. At sunset they moved us from cars onto the camels, and we took a slow ride towards the camp, the sky changing from orange to red that vanished in the ultimate black of the night. Slow or not, my butt was sore soon enough. It was a true blessing to land on the carpets in the middle of the berber camp and drink some hot mint tea. And then sneak away and lay on the dune.
The air is cool, and the chills run down my spine together with the grains of sand. Soon it will be time to sleep - I'm so tired - but now... This sky is mine.