This map at the Earth’s end has echoes of Jorge Luis Borges’s cautionary story ‘On Exactitude in Science’, which imagines a world in which the art of cartography aspires to such representative perfection that the Cartographers of the Empire construct ‘a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire’. But of course this one-to-one scale map proves both unusable and overwhelming. The ‘following Generations’, perceiving the danger of such a map, leave it to erode. ‘In the Deserts of the West,’ ends Borges’s story, ‘still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and
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