pressurization; obscurities

and on my way back to that old gone city of the west, a few faint lights shone through airplane windows, and I leaned in toward the glass, cupping my hand to block out some of the glare, in order to investigate what they were. looking down on the near-empty blackness of california, i realized that, even from this height, I could tell each individual light from the others and could see just what they were—headlight from streetlight, coachlight from traffic signal (if there had been any)—and, to my excitement, that if i pushed my nose against the glass and squinted, i could look up and see the stars as well, the land and the sky so dark that the only lights you couldn’t distinguish were those on the imperceptible border where the ground should have ended and the sky should have begun.