Great Uncle Fred? I went on a long train journey yesterday and I felt like an ant walking very slowly over a huge map of the British Isles. Please will you tell me what is the best map that there has ever been? (Jenny, Spring 2008)

string(121) "Smarty error: [in evaluated template line 1]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'From' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 590)" The best map ever? Hmm, let’s think now... Ah yes. There can be no map to compare with the two maps found in two stories, ‘Sylvie and Bruno’ by Lewis Carroll and ‘Del rigor en la ciencia’ (‘On exactitude in science’) by Jorge Luis Borges. Carroll’s story features a map that had ‘the scale of a mile to a mile’. Its size led to some practical difficulties and, ‘we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well’. Borges’ story is only one paragraph long. This is it: ‘..In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.’ . All maps are wonderful but none is so wonderful as the map of an empire which is the precise same size as the empire itself. At the moment there has been no answer logged for this question.

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