tramping
tramping
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MAPS
CIVILIZATION is short of maps. It is not familiar with its own ground plan. This is due, no doubt, to the common handicap of commercialism. Maps ought to be free for all. When you ask a man the way, you do not expect him to charge you for it—“the first on the right and the second on the left; sixpence, please.” Maps are almost as cheap to print as wall paper, and could often be used as such. We need to be familiarized with the look of the chart of the world. It is of good advantage, especially to children and to youngmen and women at the gateway of larger life, to have maps of the world in front of them, in front of them often.
You have inherited a pretty large estate by being born. You might as well know something of the plan of the grounds. Stay-at-home natures are bred by absence of wall maps. An interesting place, the old world, with some curious corners—but the mapless do not believe in it.
Geranium follows geranium on the bedroom wall, and duck follows duck, and then in the nursery innumerable Mother Hubbards look in innumerable empty cupboards for innumerable nonexisting bones, and then in the study and workroom an endless series of pale violet rails run back and forth or posies of spoiled forget-me-nots bobble before the eyes. We break the monotony with illuminated texts, samplers, oleographs of the battle of Spion Kop, portraits of aged relatives in company with “The Laughing Cavalier.” We put “God bless our Home” in large letters over the hearth—and then forget about maps which are full of blessing.
In Paris, even at the kiosks on the boulevards you can buy maps of the world for a few francs; large separate maps of Europe and Asia and America, printed in color on paper. You do not need them on canvas. It is almost worth going to Paris to get supplies of these. Thinking of getting married: go to Paris and get plenty of maps for the new home.
Atlases are not so good. You have to take them down from a shelf and consult them. Wall maps spare you the trouble; they consult you. Atlases are to be consciously studied; wall maps are busy studying you while you are thinking of other things. You are reading theArabian Nightsbut Arabia is reading you. You are turning over the pages of a picture book with a child; Siam is looking over your shoulder at the elephants. You are cooking a curry; India has marked you. As you lie in bed you see that Czechoslovakia is lying in bed, too, with her toes in the Carpathians.
Atlases have a serious defect, in that they split up the world as a butcher does a sheep, and the joints are hanging in an absurd serieson hooks. Separate maps of countries and bits of countries, as for example, northwest Germany, are not so instructive as large composite maps. It is better to look at Europe as a whole than at Europe in detail. Nevertheless, a tiny book-page map of the world or Europe or America or Asia, is of very little value. There is no merit in the miniature map. The bigger the map the better—up to a point. It should not be so large that one needs a ladder to examine Greenland. The atlas and the pocket map and the revolving sphere are the auxiliaries of the wall maps—very useful in their place if the first has been provided.
When the inspiration for wandering and tramping has come we realize what a boon maps are, we come to love them, as inseparable companions. You put local maps of countries and towns and countrysides in your pockets, and large folded maps of the Continent in your knapsacks. You unfold them in the desert; you lie on them, you crawl about with a magnifying glass examining their small print and the lost names of villages in smudgedmountain ranges. You learn by the scale what the length of your thumb or little finger means in kilometers and miles. You survey with a curious joy the dotted line of your peregrinations up to that point.
Have you seen enough of the world? Are you sure you will rest content at Kensal Rise or Père la Chaise when the time comes? Take a map of the world and a blue pencil, go back in memory over the whole of your life, start the pencil at your birthplace, and begin to draw the line of your goings to and fro upon the world. How you will rejoice in yourself if you can conduct that blue pencil chart across a great ocean, across Atlantic or Pacific! The longer and more bulging and loopy the line the more you will feel you have lived. In the later years of your life you will be able to say: “I was born into the world and I have seen something of it.”
Of course, maps have another function besides that of firing your imagination, and it would be neglectful to omit a further serious consideration. They are for helping you to find your way. How to read maps in detailis a matter of some study, as there is much more information hidden in a good scientific map of a country than at first meets the eye. When tramping across forest and mountain it is as well to carry with one sections of the Government survey, by the aid of which one can often locate oneself when otherwise hopelessly lost. You know also where you must make for for provisions, and whether you are approaching a marshy region which cannot be traversed on foot, where the fordings and ferries and bridges of a river or stream are to be found, where a forest ends, where open country is resumed. One inevitably spends hours of some days with one’s sectional map, trying to make out what point has been reached, verifying detail and verifying again.
This sort of map ought to be stoutly mounted, as it comes in for much use and is entirely in a different category from the large composite maps suitable for home or for folding within the large inner pocket of the knapsack. You thumb them so much because almost inevitably you come upon error, even in the best survey. It is highly difficult to digestsquare miles and square inches. Every map has an element of artistic impressionism, and has to be studied somewhat intuitively. What you would mark, it omits, because the map maker was of a different temperament. For that you have to allow, and not lose your patience and tear up your guide.
At home it is well to have a map cupboard and preserve and put in it every little map which has ever served you on the road or in foreign cities. You may help others with your old maps upon occasion, and you may help yourself when thinking of returning at some time upon an old track.