Land Beyond the Map

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Roland crane heard the crash of breaking glass in his study from the hall where he had gone to tap the barometer and curse the windy, overcast, beastly weather. The sound echoed hard on a blast of wind that shook the isolated old house. The carpet rippled the length of the hall like an anaconda. The lamp swung from its chain, chasing shadows like bats across the polished paneling of the walls.

He ran angrily back, almost colliding with the incomplete suit of Florentine armor, in time to see the second maid, young Annie, burst into tears.

Strewn at her feet across the Persian carpet, shards of glass glittered in the table-lamp’s illumination like the aftermath of a battle. Crane looked up.

All along the windowless north wall his map frames hung, some faded, some brightly colored, tattered, dimmed with age, charred, stained, inscribed with loving and painstaking care and the lavish curlicues of writing from the hands of men long dead. That wall dominated the room. Across from it the curtained windows and ceiling-high bookshelves counter-pointed in modern somber book-learning the high brilliance of those maps. They spoke of daring and the great venture across unknown oceans, of beckoning mists of undiscovered lands and the siren call of the sea. The salty tang of romance breathed from them into the close confinement of the somber study. From pigment and parchment beckoned the lure of the unknown.

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