필사 모드: Historical Fiction: The Cartographer

The Blank Space

Deep within the back streets of Lisbon, where the smell of fish mingled with tar at the end of a narrow lane, stood the workshop of Matthias.

It was dark even by day. There was only one window, and even that window faced not the sea but a cramped inner courtyard. Matthias had always regretted this. That a man who drew the sea should have a room with no view of the sea seemed, somehow, like a joke played by fate.

The smell of parchment and ink had soaked into the room. Finished maps and unfinished maps hung in disorder upon the walls, and on the shelves lay navigation logs and old sea charts, along with small objects brought from distant places. A piece of coral that someone had given him, a compass left behind by some navigator, a little boat carved from a wood whose name he did not know. They were the crumbs of a world Matthias had never visited. Whenever his work stalled, he would take those objects into his hand, as though through them he might, for a moment, feel the air of some far coast he had never reached.

That little wooden boat in particular was a thing Matthias treasured. An old navigator had left it to him before he died. "Thank you for drawing all the seas I have sailed," the navigator had said, holding it out. "Because of you, the things I saw remain upon paper. Even when I am dead, they will still be there." It was then that Matthias first understood that his work was not merely the drawing of lines. He was a man who kept people's memories. A man who held down upon paper the things that had nearly vanished.

On his worktable lay a stretch of parchment. Its edges were crowded with coastlines he had refined hundreds of times. Familiar capes, familiar bays, familiar river mouths. Things people had reported after returning, things written in books, stories that old sailors had let slip over their cups of wine. All of it had settled onto the paper as fine brown lines.

Matthias's hand was slow. He never hurried. Before drawing a single line, he weighed where that line had come from. Who had seen the place? Had they seen it once, or many times? Had anyone else seen the same thing? Whenever one tale diverged from another, he trusted neither carelessly, but wrote the divergence itself, small, in a corner of the paper. And so his maps grew slowly, yet what grew was solid.

The sailors on the docks would tease him for it. "Matthias's map is narrow. But follow Matthias's map and at least you will not die smashed against the rocks." It was a jest, yet it was also praise. A slow and narrow map. But a map without falsehood.

And yet the very center of the paper was empty.

Matthias looked at that blank space every day. Other mapmakers filled it with anything at all. One drew a great fish, another the face of an angel blowing the wind, still another inscribed a line of Latin. "Here be lions." Rather than writing that they did not know what they did not know, they covered the blank space with ornament.

Matthias did not do this. He left the blank space blank.

"Why leave it empty?" old Domingos, the mapmaker from the next lane over, once asked. "Customers like a full map. An empty one, they think you were lazy."

"An empty space is more honest than a lie," Matthias answered. "If I write that I know what I do not, then someone who trusts that map will lose his way. Better to leave it empty, so that at least he knows it is an unknown land."

Domingos snorted. "And has honesty ever put bread on your table?"

Matthias did not reply. But inwardly he knew. That blank space was the very thing that kept him awake at night, and at the same time the thing that kept him alive.

The Apprenticeship

Matthias had first taken up a pen at the age of twelve.

He had meant to become a navigator. Like all the children raised on the docks, he had grown up watching the ships depart. The sails swelling, the ropes drawing taut, the people waving their hands. The fact that one could not know what lay beyond all that filled him with an unbearable thrill.

But he was weak against the sea. The moment he climbed aboard even a small boat his stomach turned, and if the waves rose even a little he lay flat upon the deck and groaned. An old captain watched him and clicked his tongue. "Boy, you love the sea, but the sea does not love you."

Those words became a deep wound to the young Matthias. For there is nothing so bitter as to be refused by the thing one loves.

It was the old mapmaker Henrique who took him in. Henrique was an old man blind in one eye and trembling in the hands, yet in his workshop all the coasts of the world were gathered. When Matthias first stepped into that room, it seemed his breath stopped. Upon the maps that hung from every wall, the places he would never visit shone quietly.

"It is all right that you cannot go out upon the sea," Henrique said. "A man who draws maps sails not upon the deck but upon the paper. And upon paper, one does not grow seasick."

At those words Matthias nearly wept. He had thought the sea had refused him, but there was another road that reached the sea after all. Not the deck but the paper. Not the feet but the hands. Not seeing for oneself, but writing down the stories of those who had seen. It was not a glorious road, yet to Matthias it was mysterious enough.

From that day Matthias learned to sail upon paper.

Henrique was strict. Each time Matthias drew a single line wrong, the old man pointed at it with a trembling hand. "On what is this line based? Who went there? Can you trust that person? You are drawing a place you have never once visited. So you must at least know on what you base your drawing."

"And when the basis cannot be known?" the young Matthias asked.

Henrique was silent a long while, then answered. "Then do not draw. The moment you pretend to know what you do not, you become not a mapmaker but a liar. The most dangerous lie in the world is the lie upon a map. For ships set sail trusting it."

Matthias never forgot those words his whole life long. Even after Henrique had passed from the world, he always remembered the blank space those trembling fingers had pointed to. That he left a blank space blank was not laziness but something like a promise made to his master.

Before Henrique died, there were last words he left to Matthias. The old man took Matthias's hand in his trembling one and spoke thus: "There is one thing I have regretted all my life. In my youth, unable to resist a certain customer's urging, I once drew clearly an island I had never seen. That island did not exist. Yet my line was so clear that people believed it. How many ships wandered in search of that island I do not know. Only that, night after night, those ships come to me in dreams. Matthias, do not forget that your line may kill someone. A single point upon paper becomes, upon the sea, a single human life."

That was the master's last testament. Matthias engraved it upon his heart. And from that day on, he never once drew clearly a thing he had not seen.

The Visitor

That afternoon, there came a knock at the door.

When he opened it, a man stood in the sunlight. His clothes were neat but not extravagant, and in his hand he held a scroll wrapped in leather. His face was burned by the sun. The face of a man of the sea.

"Are you Master Matthias?" the man asked.

"I am."

"I have seen a map you drew. The southern route." The man stepped inside as he spoke. "It was unlike the others. The others filled their maps in convincingly, but yours had a blank space. I came to find you because of that blank space."

Matthias was puzzled. "A blank space is taken for a flaw. Most customers see it and turn away."

"I am no customer but a navigator," the man said. "A navigator knows what falsehood upon paper does upon the sea. A full map has nearly killed me more than once or twice. So I have decided to trust you, who honestly left the blank space empty. For a man who says he does not know what he does not know will speak honestly of what he does know."

Matthias liked those words. It was the first time anyone had read his blank space as honesty rather than flaw. He looked at the man again. Within that sun-burned face, the deep eyes that belong only to one who has long watched the sea looked back at him.

Matthias offered him a chair. "You are the first to seek a man out for a blank space."

"Because I am a man who means to fill it," the visitor said, smiling. And he unrolled the leather scroll.

Inside was a coastline drawn roughly. It was a shape Matthias had never seen. The lines trembled as if drawn in haste, and here and there were stains where water had blurred them. But Matthias's eyes followed those trembling lines and stopped. It was a coast that appeared in no one's book, in no one's tale.

His fingertips trembled faintly. All his life he had written down the memories of others, but it was the first time he had faced a coast so strange.

Matthias carried the drawing near the lamp. His eyes, which had looked all his years upon drawings made by other hands, read much at a single glance. The tremor of the lines was the trace of fear, and the spots pressed dark here and there were the places of certainty. The outline of the cliff was relatively clear, but the bay beyond it was faint. It meant that even the one who drew it had seen the cliff plainly but the bay only dimly, from afar. The paper could not lie. Where the hand had trembled, fear remained; where it had hesitated, doubt remained, just as they were.

"Where did you find this?" Matthias's voice shook.

"I saw it myself," the man said. "I went west, to where people warn you not to go. I weathered three storms, lost four sailors, and when our drinking water was nearly gone, I saw it. Black cliffs rising beyond the mist. And above them, unnamed birds taking flight."

The man's voice lowered. "They were unlike any bird we know. Their wings were long, their beaks red. They had built their nests in every crevice of the cliff, and when thousands of them rose all at once, the sky was blackened over. The sailors took it for an ill omen and feared it. But I, I found it beautiful. For even with death right before my eyes, before that sight I forgot even my thirst."

He paused and looked toward some far place, as though that cliff lay just beyond the wall of the workshop. "But we could not draw near. Below the cliff it was thick with reefs, and the wind kept pushing us back. I saw it, yet I did not set foot upon it. For to have seen and to have touched are different things."

Matthias laid a finger on the trembling line, as though those cold cliffs might be touched on the far side of the paper.

Within his breast two minds rose at once. One was that thrill of childhood, watching the ships depart from the docks. A pull that shook the whole body, felt only before the unknown. The other was his master's last testament. The warning that a single point upon paper becomes, upon the sea, a single human life. The pull and the fear stood taut against each other within him.

"My memory is faint," the man went on. "I am a navigator, not a draftsman. But you can draw it. What I saw, you can bring to life on paper with your own hand. That is why I came."

Matthias, unable to take his eyes from the drawing, asked, "How many days did it take to reach there? By which star did you set your course? In which direction did the current run?"

The man hesitated a moment. "I do not remember all of it. In the storm even the stars were hidden, and I was occupied only with surviving."

"Then how could one find the way there again?"

A shadow passed over the man's face. "Perhaps one cannot. That is what I fear. I saw the place, but I lost the way to it. As one can never again find the door of a house seen in a dream." He looked at Matthias. "That is why I ask you. Before my memory grows yet fainter, I would have someone hold it down upon paper. Otherwise that coast will vanish along with me."

At those words a chill came over Matthias's breast. The one who had seen it was a single man, and even he had lost the way. If he did not draw this, that black cliff would never rise upon anyone's map. Yet if he drew it, it would be to carve, as though true, one man's dream that could never be found again.

"Give me time to think," Matthias managed to say.

The man nodded. "Do so. It is not a thing to hurry. Only do not drag it out too long. My memory grows a little fainter each day. Perhaps before long even I will forget what shape that cliff was." He walked toward the door, then stopped and added, "Promise me one thing only. Whatever you decide, do not draw a falsehood. Better to leave it a blank space."

Matthias nodded at those words. It was also the principle he had kept all his life.

The man left the drawing where it lay and departed.

The Temptation

That night Matthias could not sleep.

The rough drawing the man had left behind lay on the worktable. Under the candlelight, those trembling lines seemed alive. Matthias studied it again and again.

The wind passed through the courtyard and shook the window. From far off came the sound of a bell. The city was asleep, but Matthias's mind was awake. He imagined the black cliff. The rock rising beyond the mist, the red-beaked birds covering it over. The sight he had never seen rose up as vividly as though he himself had seen it. And that frightened him. If he could draw the unseen so vividly, then where, after all, lay the boundary between the drawn and the seen?

All his life he had been a man who copied what belonged to others. A man who took down the tales of those who had been there and turned faint memories into tidy lines. Under his fingertips the world acquired order, but it was always a world someone else had trodden first.

He had never once added anything new to the world. All he had done was to arrange what was already known more clearly, more beautifully, more usefully. That too was worthwhile work, he had consoled himself. For someone must gather the scattered knowledge, and someone must weigh the diverging tales. But in the depths of his breast, that thrill of watching the ships depart from the docks in childhood still pricked him. The thrill of not knowing what lay beyond. The sorrow of knowing that he himself would never, in the end, go beyond.

And now, before him, lay a coast no one had ever drawn.

If he drew this, the map would be the only one of its kind in all the world. His name might be attached to that coast. Navigators of later generations would sail along the lines he had drawn. He would no longer be a man who copied, but a man who had widened the edge of the world by a hand's breadth.

He imagined the scene. Far in the future, some young mapmaker unrolling his map and marveling. "Who first drew this coast?" And someone would answer. "Matthias. A man who sailed upon paper all his life, in some narrow workshop in Lisbon." The boy who, weak against the sea, had retched upon the deck, reaching at last the edge of the world, if only upon paper.

His heart beat fast.

But soon another thought took hold of him.

This drawing was only one man's memory. A faint impression seen while battered by storms, parched by thirst, on the threshold of death. Were the cliffs beyond the mist truly the shape he had seen? Was the bay between them truly so deep? Every line he drew would be built upon the unverified word of a single man.

And if he were wrong.

Navigators of later generations would trust that line and row westward. But if there were no cliffs there. If there were no reef, no bird, nothing but empty sea. They would wander, cursing Matthias's line. Perhaps at the end of that futile voyage someone would lose his life. Like those ships his master had seen in dreams.

Matthias looked again at the trembling line on the parchment. Then he thought of the blank space he had always kept empty. All his life he had guarded that blank space so as not to draw a lie. And now, to draw the very thing he most longed to draw, he would have to render the unverified as though it were truth.

"Here be lions." The phrase the other mapmakers wrote in their blank spaces came to him. Had they too begun this way? Drawing the unseen as though it had been seen.

Matthias rose and looked at the old maps that hung upon the wall. They were inherited from Henrique. On one of them, a certain island had been drawn with a clear, solid line. An island someone had sworn beyond doubt to have seen. But Matthias knew. That island did not exist. Navigators of later generations had gone in search of it again and again, yet there had been only the rolling empty sea. A vision some exhausted sailor had seen in his thirst had become, at the confident fingertips of a mapmaker, a solid line, and the ships that trusted that line had rowed in vain.

That phantom island had remained upon maps for nearly a hundred years. The moment one man's mistake became a clear line, it took a hundred years to erase it.

A chill ran down Matthias's spine. If he drew the black cliff as a clear, solid line, who could swear it would not become yet another phantom island? Yet at the same time, if he drew nothing at all, might not a coast that truly existed be buried in darkness forever?

To draw was frightening, and not to draw was frightening too. Caught between the two fears, he gazed at the parchment until the candle had burned down.

Toward dawn, he dozed off. And he dreamed.

In the dream he was upon a ship. There was no seasickness. The deck beneath his feet was solid, the sea was calm. When the mist lifted, far off the black cliff rose. It was the very cliff the man had spoken of. He drew near to it. Nearer, and nearer. Above the cliff the unnamed birds soared up.

But the moment the ship was about to reach the cliff, the cliff began to blur. Like ink dissolving into water. The black rock turned to mist, and the birds scattered into stains upon paper. Matthias reached out his hand, but all that he grasped was empty air.

He understood. That he had not seen the cliff himself, but through the man's words. The cliff he had dreamed was not a true cliff but a shadow that one man's memory had drawn within his mind. He had been chasing a shadow.

Matthias woke in a cold sweat. Beyond the window a pale gray was breaking. For a while he sat in the dark, pondering deeply what it was he meant to draw. It was not a coast he had never seen. What he meant to draw was the memory of one who had seen it. If so, then the most honest thing he could draw was not the coast itself, but the very fact that it was a "memory."

That thought, for the first time, eased him a little.

But the ease did not last. Soon another question raised its head. Even if he drew the memory, what if the memory were not true? What if the black cliff were truly a phantom made by thirst? Would he not become a fool carving one man's illusion upon paper? Matthias clutched his head in his hands. To know was a thing this difficult. In a world where nothing whatever was certain, it was still his work to hold something down upon paper.

At the Harbor

The next day Matthias went down to the harbor.

He was a man who rarely left his workshop, but that day he wanted to see the sea. The real sea, the one that was not empty.

The sea upon paper was always calm. The waves he drew never surged, the wind he drew never blew. But the real sea was different. The real sea was salt, and rough, and ceaselessly moving. Standing before it, Matthias always understood how small a being he was. Even all his maps together could not contain a single one of those rolling waves.

Ships lined the quay. Some were making ready to depart, others had only just returned. On the deck of a returning ship, sailors unloaded their cargo. Sacks of spice, chests built from strange wood, objects adorned with feathers he had never seen. Fragments brought back from the edge of the world.

Before that sight Matthias always felt the same thing. A feeling of envy mixed with fear. He did not know from what tree the spice in those sacks had come, of what bird those feathers were. What he knew was only the lines upon paper. But the lines gave off no scent, and had no weight. The real world was always outside his paper.

Once a young sailor had asked him, "How do you draw places you have never even visited?" Matthias had answered then, "I do not draw the places; I draw the words of those who have seen them. I am not a man who draws the world, but a man who draws people's memories of the world." The young sailor tilted his head, but to Matthias that difference was everything.

Matthias stood beside an old sailor who was coiling rope and humming to himself.

"Have you been far?" Matthias asked.

The sailor glanced at him. "Far. As if far were somewhere set apart. Once you set out, it is all the same water and the same sky."

"And yet you see what you have never seen before."

The sailor paused his hands and thought for a moment. "You do. You see what you have never seen. But here is the thing." He looked Matthias straight in the eye. "Once you have seen what you never saw before, you forget forever what it was to not have seen it. What is once seen can never be made unseen again."

Matthias turned those words over in his mind for a long while.

"But, old man," Matthias asked, "who believes the thing you saw? If you alone saw it, is it truly there, or is it something your eye invented?"

The sailor laughed heartily. "That I do not know either. Only I would say this. If another sees what I saw, then at last it becomes a thing of the world. What I alone have seen is still only mine. To become a thing of the world, two pairs of eyes are needed." He took up the rope again. "So, young man, whatever you draw, be sure to write down how many have seen it. What one man has seen and what a hundred have seen are not the same thing."

Those words pierced Matthias's breast like an arrow. What one man has seen and what a hundred have seen are not the same. And yet upon a map, both become the same black line. That was precisely the problem.

On the way home, he understood what it was that he feared. It was not only the fear of being wrong. What he feared was that, once he drew that coast, he could never return to the state of not having seen it. Filling a blank space could not be undone. What was filled could not be emptied again. Discovery carried a price: the price that no one can ever return to before they knew.

At the mouth of the lane he came upon Domingos. The old mapmaker looked at Matthias's face and asked at once, "You look ill. What is the matter?"

Matthias hesitated a moment, then poured out the tale of the visitor and the drawing. Domingos's eyes glittered.

"Why do you hesitate at that!" he cried. "A coast no one has ever seen, why, that is a fortune that comes scarcely once in a lifetime. Draw it at once. Clearly, boldly. Your name will be fixed to that coast. Posterity will remember you."

"But what if it is wrong?"

Domingos shrugged. "What if it is? By then we shall already be in the earth, and someone will correct the map. Are not all the maps in the world redrawn by the next generation in any case? Wait for the perfect map and you will draw nothing."

Matthias thought there was reason in those words. Yet at the same time he recalled the ships that had rowed in vain after the phantom island. To Domingos a wrong line was merely a matter for the next generation to correct, but to someone who set sail trusting that wrong line, it was a matter of life.

"Thank you," Matthias said briefly, and they parted. Both men's words were right. That was what made it harder still.

The Dotted Line

That night Matthias sat before the worktable and unrolled a fresh sheet of blank parchment.

He took up the pen and set it down, took it up and set it down again. To draw a clear, solid line seemed it would become a falsehood, and to draw nothing seemed it would bury a coast that might truly exist. Caught between the two roads, his hand would not move, as though paralyzed.

Then suddenly he recalled the other maps he possessed. There had always been two kinds of line upon them. Places measured firsthand were thick and clear, places heard of secondhand were thin. The main course of a river dark, a tributary whose end was lost in mist faint. People glanced past that difference without thought, but within the difference of thin line and thick line was hidden, in fact, the information of "how certain is this."

If that is so, Matthias thought, if there are degrees of certainty, then should there not be degrees of line as well? Between the seen and the unseen, the thing in between, should it not be drawn with a line in between?

He set the nib to the paper. And instead of drawing in one stroke, he began to break it short and mark dots. A dot, a gap, a dot, a gap. A line that was a line and yet not a line. A thing that was there and yet not wholly there yet. The dotted line grew slowly upon the paper, following the outline of the black cliff.

While he drew, Matthias's mind grew strangely still. There was no guilt of drawing a falsehood, no fear of burying a truth. He was only drawing as much as he knew, exactly that much. A coast one man had seen and no one yet had confirmed. That very fact, just as it was, the dotted line spoke honestly.

As dawn drew near, the outline of the cliff was finished. Beside it Matthias wrote small letters. Then he laid down the pen and, for the first time in a long while, slept deeply.

That night he did not dream of the cliff blurring away. In the dream he was again upon a ship, but this time he did not draw near to the cliff. He only gazed at it from afar, and placed a single dot upon paper. That was enough. Even without reaching it, to record honestly what had been seen. That was all he could do, and also all he ought to do.

The Decision

The man came again three days later.

"How did it go?" he asked. "Did you draw it?"

Matthias led him to the worktable. On the parchment lay a new drawing. Not the rough sketch the man had left, but one redrawn by Matthias's own hand.

But the man soon noticed something strange.

Matthias had drawn the coast. The black cliffs, the deep bay, the outline beyond the mist. But he had drawn it with a different kind of line. The familiar coastlines were sharp, solid strokes of brown, but this new coast was traced in a thin dotted line. And beside it, in small letters, was written:

"Reported seen by one navigator. None has yet seen it twice."

The man studied those letters for a long time. His finger moved slowly along the dotted line. As though each single dot were the trace of the way he had lost.

"You drew it as a dotted line," he said.

"A dotted line," Matthias answered. "I drew what you saw. It is true, for you. But I could not write that it was verified, for that would become a lie. So I drew it as a dotted line. This is a discovery, but a discovery not yet confirmed."

The man was silent for a while. Matthias thought he would grow angry. He had surely come hoping for a solid line, for certain glory. What a customer pays for and wants is usually clarity. Certainty rather than doubt, fullness rather than gaps. A dotted line might perhaps seem like an insult to the customer.

Matthias added quietly, "If you wish it, I will draw it again as a solid line. Then it would look bolder. But that would be to say I know what I do not. I was not taught that way. My master taught that falsehood upon paper kills men upon the sea."

But the man laughed.

The man gently pressed the end of the dotted line with his finger. There his expression slowly eased.

"A dotted line," he said, nodding. "That is more honest. To tell the truth, I am not certain I believe everything I saw in the mist. On some nights I cannot be sure whether it was a cliff, or merely a phantom my thirst had made."

He was silent a moment, then added. "In truth, I was afraid. Afraid you would draw it for me as a clear, solid line. For then I would be putting my faint memory out into the world pretending it was sure truth. That was not what I wished. I wished only that, whatever it was I saw, it should not be forgotten. A dotted line is exactly that much. Enough not to be forgotten, yet not so much as to become a falsehood."

"That is why it is a dotted line," Matthias said. "If someone goes there again, and sees the same cliffs, and returns, then we will join these dots. The dotted line will become solid. And on that day, this coast will truly take its place on the map of the world."

The man gazed long upon the dotted line. Then slowly he lifted his head.

"Even if I never find that place again," he said quietly, "this dotted line remains?"

"It remains," Matthias answered. "What you saw does not vanish. It only waits to be confirmed. A dotted line is not the forgotten, but the not-yet-proven. The two are different."

Something welled in the man's eyes. Whether relief, or sorrow, Matthias could not tell. Perhaps it was both.

"It was the most beautiful thing I saw in all my life, that black cliff," the man said. "I was afraid it would vanish along with me. And you have held it down upon paper. Even if only as a dotted line." He rose. "Thank you, mapmaker. You have made a place for my memory. At the edge of the world."

The man would have paid the fee he had promised, but Matthias took only half of it. "The other half," he said, "I will take when someone joins this dotted line into a solid one. Until then this work is not finished."

The man left through the door, smiling. Behind his back, from the end of the narrow lane, the smell of the sea came pressing in.

Matthias stood at the doorway and gazed long after the figure receding down the lane. The man would go back to the sea. Perhaps he would try to find the black cliff again. Perhaps he would never find it. That was a thing Matthias could not know. What he could do, he had done. To make a place for one man's memory. To hold it down with an honest dotted line, so that it would not vanish, yet would not become a falsehood either.

As he closed the door, Matthias thought. Perhaps every map is only a gathering of someone's memory striving not to vanish.

The Place of the Dotted Line

After the man had gone, Matthias looked at the map for a long time.

The center of the paper was no longer empty. But neither was it full. There stood a dotted line, somewhere between the blank and the filled.

He gazed long upon that dotted line. It was unlike any line he had drawn in all his life. It did not declare, as a solid line does, nor did it keep silent, as a blank space does. The dotted line was speaking. "Something may be here. But it is not yet certain." That honest voice seemed to Matthias more beautiful than any clear line.

Matthias thought that perhaps this was what mapmaking truly was. To draw clearly what you know, to leave honestly empty what you do not, and to join with a dotted line the faint things in between. Discovery was not the filling of a blank space all at once, but the careful placing of a single dot, and the waiting for the next person to place another dot beside it.

He recalled the confident maps of the other mapmakers. Those sheets full without a single blank space. People would marvel at them, but Matthias knew. The fuller the map, the more falsehood it held. The truly honest map was the one that frankly showed how far it knew and from where it did not. A map unashamed of its not-knowing. A map that boldly held its blank spaces and its dotted lines.

Perhaps the human heart is no different, he thought. The man who knows honestly how far he knows goes farther than the man who fills in, pretending to know what he does not. For only the one who does not fear the blank space can sail toward that blank space.

Curiosity had drawn him toward the blank space. Honesty had held him at the dotted line. And the tension between the two was the very force that had kept him at his worktable all his life.

Suddenly he recalled his master Henrique. The old man pointing at the blank space with trembling fingers. If Henrique were here now, what would he say? Would he scold him for the dotted line, or would he nod? Matthias wished to believe it would be the latter. For what his master had taught was not that one must never touch the blank space, but that one must reveal honestly on what one based one's drawing. The dotted line was not a breaking of that teaching but a step further beyond it. Between leaving empty for not-knowing and filling in for knowing, there was a third road, the marking of dimly-knowing.

Perhaps his master too had known that road. Only in his time there had not yet been the courage to draw it.

Outside, another ship was leaving the harbor. Someone would weather the storms again, someone would endure the thirst again, and would return having seen some thing beyond the mist. And one day, one of them would knock at the door of this workshop, carrying another trembling line.

Matthias thought of himself as the final destination of all those tales. The place where the memories of those who went out upon the sea flowed and flowed and arrived. He received them, sifted them, weighed them, and turned them into honest lines. When he died his maps would be taken up by some other hand, and that person, looking upon the dotted lines Matthias had left, would learn how far was certain and from where lay the unknown. That was what Matthias left to the world. Not a full falsehood, but honest blank spaces and humble dotted lines.

When that day came, Matthias would take up his pen again. He would place a single dot, carefully. The edge of the world would widen so, one dot at a time.

He looked out the window. Over the cramped courtyard, the evening sky was turning red. The sea was not visible. But Matthias knew it was there. Unseen, undrawn though it was, the sea was there. Waiting for him to place a dot.

Long years afterward, on some day long after Matthias had passed from the world, a young navigator returned from the western sea having seen a black cliff. Upon an old map hanging in a Lisbon workshop, he found, traced as a dotted line, the very outline he had seen. Beside it were small, faded letters. "Reported seen by one navigator. None has yet seen it twice." The young navigator stood before it a long while. Then he asked for a pen and carefully joined the gaps between dot and dot. The dotted line at last became a solid line. But that is another tale, and Matthias did not see that day.

The Matthias of this night only knew. That the single dot he had placed would not be in vain. That someday someone would place the next dot beside it. And that was enough.

He did not put out the candle, and sat down again before the parchment.

A Note from the Author

The maps of the Age of Exploration truly did have many blank spaces, and mapmakers took different attitudes toward them. Some filled them with imaginary creatures and ornament; others left them honestly empty. Warning phrases in the vein of "Here be lions" have come down to us as symbols of the unknown.

This story is pure invention drawn from that period's atmosphere. Neither Matthias nor the navigator who sought him out is a real person. What I wanted to portray was the distance between "knowing" and "believing one knows," and one man's stubborn insistence on marking that distance honestly.

Discovery is always alluring. But discovery carries a price. What is once seen cannot be unseen, and a line once drawn leaves a trace even when erased. The dotted line Matthias chose may be the most human line we can draw between curiosity and honesty: the courage to admit we do not know, and the courage to place one dot anyway. When those two stand together, the map of the world grows wider, little by little.

The motif of the dotted line, in truth, resembles every process by which we come to know something. At first there is someone's faint testimony, and it is still a dotted line. When another confirms the same thing, the gaps between dot and dot are filled and it becomes a solid line. And sometimes, a solid line that seemed clear turns out to have been a mistake, and is erased again. The map of the knowledge we hold has grown by being ceaselessly drawn, joined, and erased so.

So I do not think Matthias is a hero. He is not a man who set out upon an unknown sea, nor a man who made some great discovery. He is only a man who strove to draw as much as he knew. In some ways a man cautious to the point of being stifling. But such caution, gathered together, makes the maps by which people may sail in peace. A brilliant discovery is remembered by someone, but what keeps that discovery from being in vain is the honest touch of those like Matthias.

Before the unknown world we always stand at a fork of two roads. To halt, saying we do not know, or to speak a falsehood, saying we do. Matthias opened between them a third road, the dotted line. Perhaps before many of the questions of our lives too, that third road is the most honest and most courageous road. I hope this short tale has placed that single small dot somewhere in your heart.