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what he thought fifteen years of working on
Dunstan’s Library Atlas
would make possible, all the years of his employment, from his youthful self to the forty-year-old man he has somehow become. To create a map of the world is to include everything known to human existence. It is to sort through all the various renderings of the earth and choose from the shapes and sizes of the land masses, settling on those that seem the most accurate. It is to read the diaries and logs of explorers and sailors who are journeying into the still-unmapped places of the world—the Far North, the Antarctic, the jungles and deserts and mountains, the remote reaches of humanity. To make a map of the world is to believe in the dotted line that shows the voyage from Portugal to Newfoundland. It is to go through the evidence and make a case for the world appearing a particular way. One of the earliest surviving maps of the British Isles was plotted by a man named Lawrence Nowell. He made no attempt to obtain proper bearings or to include an accurate scale. His map is drawn as if he had just sailed along the coast of England and put down what he saw. The map, drawn on a narrow strip of paper, is over twenty-five feet in length. Eldon imagines Lawrence Nowell, bobbing up and down in a small boat, perhaps rowed or sailed by a friend or family member. Lawrence sitting on the bilge boards, to minimize the motion, looking up at the rocks and bays, the gulls circling, looking down at his shaky line on the wind-blown paper. Did he see England differently, now that he was recording it? Was he confident that he was getting it right? Did what he ended up with on the paper resemble what he saw from the boat?
    There is something comforting to Eldon in those early maps. The lack of perspective. The seeming casualness to the lines. The fidelity to the original shape of a mountain or lake. The concentration on the four elements that were of the most importance to the cartographer in his daily life—towns, the sea, mountains, and forests. The simple purity of the act of making the map, so that the map-maker would find his way back to where he was, so that others could find their way there.
    For Eldon to do as Dunstan wants and make a theme map of the world is to go against all those early map-makers, to go against what they believed in. It is as if Lawrence Nowell sat in his small creaky boat only marking on his map the composition of the rocks on the shore, not looking for anything else, not trying to include all that he saw. To mark down the mineral deposits in South America relegates the map to a mere guide. Exploration loses its edge of curiosity and becomes only a reason for exploitation. Eldon can believe in Lawrence Nowell’s desire to make his map as something exalted and noble, unselfish. Who will see Eldon Dashell’s map of the world’s mineral resources as a testament to his vision of the limits of human endeavour?
    Eldon looks down at the map in front of him.
Trust me.
That’s what maps are saying.
Trust me.
Never mind that early metal globes were cut in half and used for pots by hungry sailors. Never mind that all forests and mountains on maps throw their shadows to the east, because draughtsmen usually work with the light on their left, which means that on a map it is always a sunny afternoon. Where you find yourself is always afternoon. Never mind that the most common method for projecting the world, the Mercator projection, flattens the round earth and alters the spatial perspective, thus making Greenland nine to twenty-two times its actual size. Europe becomes the centre of the world. Africa is smaller, so too South America, slipping down the side. Making something round into something flat, to sail off the edge of the world, again.
    Distance. Position. How to find your way back when where you are depends on where everything else is. Here we are. Here is everything else. A compass of the human body—head as North, feet South, right arm East,