The Cartographers

by Peng Shepherd

there’s a longstanding secret practice among cartographers of hiding intentional errors—phantom settlements—in their works.

Even to this day, the Fra Mauro map was considered one of the finest pieces of medieval cartography in existence.

“There’s value in every failure,” a voice behind them said then, as if on cue. “It shows us what doesn’t work, and gets us that much closer to understanding what will.”

small-scale maps, which depict buildings and floor plans, we tend to refer to these phantom settlements, these secrets, as just that: trap rooms.”

Cartography, at its heart, was about defining one’s place in the world by creating charts and measurements. Nell had lived her life by that idea, that everything could be mapped according to references and thereby understood. But she could see now that she had been paying attention to the wrong references. It was not a map alone that made a place real. It was the people.

“Maps aren’t meant to be secrets, Wally. They’re meant to be shared,”