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ornamental, was timeless. He had filled the margins with a delightful sequence of medieval runes, composing a border:
     
    It was a dramatic stylistic departure from the single black line used to delineate the borders of most other maps of the day.
    For the first time in history a cartographer had accurately depicted the cultural features of the Palatinate. A twenty-first century traveler using the map could find his way around with ease. The towns of the region—Kirn, Idar, Oberstein, Kaiserslautern, Zweibrücken—were drawn in a graphic style, each cultural element exaggerated in scale. Many of the roads had not changed since Cellarius’s time other than when they were paved. Buildings appeared in perspective, and the churches, castles, and stately homes still standing were immediately recognizable.
    But there was nevertheless something about the map that bothered John, something that had lurked in his subconscious from the first moment he laid eyes on it. Until Cellarius’s resurrection from the bog, the Palatinate map had merely been the last one he had completed. Now that it was clear Cellarius had been murdered, his final professional effort demanded greater scrutiny, and John could allow the subtle naggings to surface. He stared at the map for several more minutes, then impulsively picked up the phone and dialed a number.
    “You say the Palatinate map was never commissioned? He just did it for the fun of it?”
    “I wouldn’t say it was for the fun of it,” replied Dr. Carl Antonelli, one of John’s former cartography professors at Franklin & Marshall College. “But it’s true there’s no record, none that has come to light anyway, that anyone ordered this map from Cellarius.”
    “You’ve seen the original pressing, haven’t you?”
    “Yes, at the University of Southern Maine. I assume they still have it. Cellarius only made one print from the copper plate, which was itself quite unusual. Part of the margin was torn off; the upper right corner is completely gone.”
    “Not according to my copy.”
    “That’s because they don’t print facsimiles in any form other than a square or a rectangle. Your copy probably has an extrapolated margin. By the way, this is the only regular square map Cellarius ever made; all the rest have one dimension longer than the other. Were you aware of that?”
    “No.”
    “The interesting thing about the margin of the Palatinate map is that it contains those strange symbols, the so-called runes, almost like a message or a cipher. They don’t appear on any of his other maps, and no one’s been able to figure them out.”
    “If they might be significant, why haven’t they been followed up with some kind of cryptological analysis?”
    “Well, John, you have to admit, that map’s a little obscure. You and I don’t think so, but to the rest of the world it’s just a dusty old piece of paper, one of thousands of its kind. How many cryptologists do you know who collect maps? For that matter, how many cryptologists do you know at all? Maybe somebody’s done something with it, I don’t know. But nothing’s been published on the subject, I can tell you that.”
    “I just figured they were abstract graphic designs.”
    “And they may well be. You know what the funniest thing is about the Palatinate map to me? The latitude-longitude grid. It conforms to no standard geographic grid, past or present, nor does it correspond to any particular unit of measure. Historians of cartography have long concluded that Cellarius merely drew an arbitrary grid. But you know as well as I do, that wasn’t his style.”
    “Maybe that’s what’s been bothering me.”
    “There’s another thing: the biblical quote that appears—oddly—in English.”
    John read directly from his facsimile: “ ‘All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivvers come, thither they return again.’ Ecclesiastes, chapter one, verse seven.”
    “That’s the