I'm breaking the Language Pledge

Why can you see clouds at night? If it's by starlight or moonlight, aren't the clouds usually covering the moon and the stars? And if there's lots of light from the moon and stars, there probably aren't clouds. But you do see clouds at night, or course, like last night, when Aiko and Laurel and Abby and I were getting eaten by mosquitos and gradually slipping down a hill in our sleeping bags and looking up at a skimpy little tree that looked very geometrically impressive when you lie under it in the dark. The answer's rather boring, I guess- you see stars at night when there are only some of them, and not all the sky is covered, or when there's enough light coming from, say, Bi Hall to show them. Still, it seems like a funny sight to me, a strange study in gray-on-black. Speaking of light at night, is there really such thing as starlight? I don't understand how those tiny little pricks of light could possibly produce light on the ground. I suspect that starlight is a romantic construction and all light at night comes from cities or the moon.
Once a man in Mexico who grew up in a tiny village in the Sierra Gorda of Queretaro, a village to which they only built a road maybe 10 years ago, where everyone worked and sang all day and grew and drank strong coffee that he still drives far out to the mountains to buy (or makes the Americans in his house go out to the mountains and buy), told me that when he was a little boy his father once sent him to the next village for some reason (either I don't remember the reason or I never understood it, as this was my first summer studying Spanish) on a horse. And it was the darkest night there could ever be, with not one star and not one house with a light in the window, just miles and miles of black. And Adan couldn't see the horse's head, let alone the road, and he just sat there on that horse and trusted that it knew the way. I wonder if you would start doubting that there was really a horse beneath you, and when you would stop looking for a light, even at the back of your mind.