The Last Cartographer

When not found shaping wood and tin to fantastic creations, John Walker, his body 81 years old, his mind dwelling somewhere in childhood, could be found poring over the ancient maps in his study. They calmed him. They gave him a sense of timelessness when all around him rushed forward in eager expectation of tomorrow. John was more content to look back, to cast his gaze over his own life and beyond over that of his father, and his father’s father, back to times when the world was flat and maps grew as milk spilling on the floor, horizons stretching and forming under each new sweep of the spyglass from gull-haloed ships. Back then there was adventure in every whiff of the sea breeze, new people to discover, new creatures and plants too vivid and outlandish to be birthed from a mere man’s imagination. And just below the water, lurking on the edge of the tide, waited mermen, toothed creatures, giant squid and ghost crews from ships long sunk. They were all there, waiting for the unwary sailor to slip from his rigging and into the deep.

It was the mapmakers who were the true explorers, great men whose names now engraved maps which many saw as naïve trinkets, blessed with the knowledge of GPS and geography text books. Chronological arrogance appalled John, who saw these men as the last true adventurers the world has seen. They were men born with great names and who lived up to them. He thought back to his own grandfather, a bear of a man with an easy laugh and a story for every empty evening. John would sit transfixed for hours, his grandfather’s voice washing over him like warm water from a jug when his mother cleaned his hair in the tub. Together on these balmy nights on the veranda, they visited the orient in times of sheiks, camels and veiled beauties. They ate dates and rode horses and came to desert fortresses where they rescued girls like desert flowers from scimitar-guarded harems. They sailed frigates over the edges of frayed old maps, tantalisingly close to the maws of monsters and the lascivious smiles of naked mermaids. They monkeyed into countless crow’s nests and called ‘Land ho!’ sighting islands never before seen by blue eyes. They joined the scallywag crews of dubiously honourable pirates to liberate fair maidens abducted by fierce pygmies. They drank from coconuts. They fell parched upon oases. They walked through spice markets as the first white men. They duelled scarred foes. They fell in love. They dusted the desert from their hands. They walked with nomads. They huddled under thin blankets in Himalayan snows. They trod before train tracks in deepest Africa and swam in the Ganges. They bartered for ivory and ran dodging poisoned darts. Adventure seeped deeply into the evenings from the well of his grandfather’s memory, his voice gravel and whiskey and gun powder, flick knives and stubble and leather.

The new maps, laser-printed and perfect, intelligent thanks to inherited knowledge from atlases grown senile, were things of great concern to John. Their precision had robbed them of all the qualities he felt maps needed to possess; adventure, a tingling in the belly, a taste that treasure was to be found, the worry of dangerous natives and places named for skulls and treachery and monsoon wrecks. There were no more hidden places, no strange animal cries to chill the soul quivering next to a camp fire, no lurking traps. All the blanks had been filled, all the adventure had been used up. Satellites flitted through the sky like whispers from a knowing mouth, sending, receiving, spying, telling. Great mysteries, which once afforded the dreamers nights of fancy, planning trips to dusty places that knew only the hooves of donkeys, were now shaken and lost like the cobwebs they brushed off their Stetsons in forbidden caves. Where once devils and mischievous winds prowled on the edges of maps, now sat oceans bleak and empty. The old explorers, great men now rendered obsolete, turned to drink and told their yellowing tales to anyone who would listen. What had become of myth? Were the times of antiquity to slide beyond consciousness? Were heroic deeds, pursued in order to achieve some kind of immortality, to be murdered and replaced by the exploits of celebrity misdemeanour? John always had to channel his mind away from such dark thoughts, and he could quickly lose himself in the tiny lives waging their war against time in the worn out pages he so minutely examined.

In the still, golden, dust-sweet air of his study, John would fall headfirst through time and disappear completely. He flew amongst the hanging gardens in Babylon, he sailed beneath the Colossus of Rhodes, he heard reading lips moving, the sound of learning, in the library at Alexandria. If he flipped a map sideways mountain ranges leapt above him, biting hot desert sand stung his eyes and arctic winds shivered him. He slashed through jungles with a machete on treasure maps that were treasures in themselves and slapped at giant mosquitoes which whirred about him arrogantly.

He visited the desert in North Africa and cried as he remembered the violence of the tanks he fought in, of the shifting landscape, of the taste of acrid smoke on his tongue, of the naked fear of death, of friends falling inert in the sand. He thought of the sand dunes that could have built up over each dead soldier, a fitting tombstone for those who lost their lives in a place no one would remember or could recognise upon returning. Sand dunes were in fact the only enemies of the exactitude of the modern map, shifting quickly, continental drift in a matter of days, weeks, months, years, the wind a shaping force creative and demented and inexplicable.

John could not be roused from these trips he embarked upon at the scrutiny of every map. He was lost to creaking vessels, to the backs of elephants, to the chatter of Pidgin English. He rode magic carpets behind fakirs, joined the caravans of Arabs and ran his fingers over cave paintings. And it was with this knowledge of bygone eras, of voyages to unknown places, of the scent of oil-polished leather, that he started to draw his own maps of places without fast food restaurants, without the treads of running shoes, without the click and whir of a tourist’s camera. And so John Walker, with a steady hand and a vacuum in his belly, thrust his pen back in time and drew history up again, gave it a sip of water from the highest, purest source and set it scampering about its task of setting young boys’ minds on fire once again, to cobweb televisions and movie theatres, to breathe new life into a world gone stale and cynical.

And his pile of maps grew.