Flashback

From our encampment on a low rise southwest of the city, we were able to see the tower of the Stratosphere far to the north (with its roller coaster and other rides at the top still running) all the way to the Luxor near the south wall, the glass pyramid’s laser spotlight visibly stabbing into space during the day as well as night. But it was at night that Las Vegas was in its true element: the lights and searchlights and lasers of what had been the MGM Grand and the Mandalay Bay and the Excalibur and Paris and New York–New York. Some came complete with their somehow touching miniatures, the Statue of Liberty and the scaled-down Eiffel Tower. We could also see the curve of the Bellagio and not-quite-topless towers of Bally’s, Harrah’s, the Imperial Palace, Treasure Island, the Google Grand, and the Mirage towering over the low, midcentury clusters of Caesars Palace and the downtown Sahara, Riviera, and the old Circus Circus.

Just east of the airport were the lighted white domes of the Taj Mahal—120 percent scale of the original—but only the lower domes there were casinos and hotels; the main dome was the India-built reactor that cooled and lighted Las Vegas now that Hoover Dam was only a memory.

Since almost all of the small towns that once defied Nevada’s heat and dryness are abandoned now—the Mesquites and Tonopahs and Elys and Elkos and Battle Mountains and Pahrumps and Searchlights, everything up to the size of Reno and Carson City that had their own reactors but still had lost more than 80 percent of their populations—I could only imagine how brilliant Las Vegas must look from space when the terminator of night has been drawn across this part of the American West.

Beside the flickering, blazing lights inside the walled city itself—the very translucent walls, inhabited as they are now by hotel rooms and casinos of their own, glowing golden at night—there were myriad more lights encamped out on the desert: huge trucks by the thousands, their rig lights flashing, and in their lighted circles the giant campfires with wood hauled a thousand miles and more for just that purpose.