By the time the keeper of paths had grown old, the maps she made were trusted throughout the country.
Travellers carried them folded in their packs.
Merchants kept them beside their ledgers.
Children learned to read them before they were old enough to walk the longer roads.
On every map there were lines for the paths, marks for the rivers, signs for the mountains, and small circles for the places where people lived.
No one thought much about the lines anymore.
They were simply there.
And because they were there, people knew where they were.
The keeper had once thought this was the purpose of a map.
Now she was no longer so sure.
One autumn morning, a young traveller came to her house carrying an old map.
He placed it carefully upon the table.
"Can you tell me," he asked, "what this means?"
The keeper looked down.
It was a map she herself had drawn many years before.
"I remember making it," she said.
"Then tell me what the lines are."
"They show the paths."
"And the empty spaces?"
"The land between them."
The young traveller frowned.
"And the little marks?"
"The places where things are."
He looked relieved.
"So the map tells us what is there."
The keeper was silent for a while.
Then she took a stone from the windowsill and placed it on the map.
"Where is this?"
The traveller laughed.
"Here, of course."
"But the stone is here."
She pointed to the mark beneath it.
"And that is the place where the stone is."
He looked at her uncertainly.
"Yes."
The keeper moved the stone.
"Now where is it?"
"There."
She moved it again.
"And now?"
"There."
She smiled.
"You have begun to see the difficulty."
The traveller looked at the map.
"It tells us where things are."
"Yes."
"And the world gives us the things."
"Yes."
"Then what is the difficulty?"
The keeper folded the map.
"For many years I thought the map was successful because it followed the world closely."
She looked towards the window.
"Then I began to wonder whether it was successful because the world could be seen in the way the map allowed it to be seen."
The traveller said nothing.
Outside, the road disappeared among the trees.
The keeper took him there.
They walked for several hours until they reached a broad clearing.
"Look around you," she said.
The traveller looked.
There was a road behind them.
A river crossed the valley below.
Mountains stood beyond it.
Trees filled the slopes.
Everything seemed to have its place.
The traveller smiled.
"It is all just as the map shows."
"Is it?"
He looked again.
The keeper pointed to the river.
"Where does it begin?"
He pointed upstream.
"There."
"And where does it cease to be the river?"
He hesitated.
She pointed to the valley.
"And the road?"
She pointed behind them.
"Where does the road end?"
He turned.
The road continued until it became smaller, then disappeared among the trees.
"And the mountain?"
He looked towards the distant ridge.
"Where does the mountain end and the sky begin?"
The traveller laughed.
"At its edge."
"Which edge?"
He stopped laughing.
The keeper said nothing more.
They walked on.
That evening they camped beside the river.
The traveller watched the water move past.
"It seems strange," he said.
"What does?"
"That everything looks so obvious until you ask where it begins."
The keeper smiled.
"That is one of the old secrets of maps."
"What secret?"
"The better they become, the less you notice that they are doing anything."
She stirred the fire.
"When I was young, I thought a map was a collection of marks placed upon an empty world."
"And now?"
"Now I think the marks teach the eye what to notice."
She took a stick and drew a line in the earth.
"This is a boundary."
Then she rubbed it away.
"This is no longer a boundary."
She drew another.
"This is a path."
Then she crossed it with her hand.
"And this is a river."
The traveller watched.
"But the earth hasn't changed."
"No."
"Only the way we have divided it."
"Yes."
She looked into the fire.
"And after we have divided it in the same way for long enough, we forget that we divided it at all."
The traveller was quiet.
"What do we call it then?"
The keeper looked at the darkening valley.
"We call it the world."
For a long time neither spoke.
The next morning they returned to the keeper's house.
The young traveller opened the old map again.
He pointed to the lines.
"So these are not false."
"No."
"And the places are real."
"Yes."
"And the roads really do take us somewhere."
"Yes."
"Then what have we discovered?"
The keeper smiled.
"Nothing has been taken away from the world."
She placed her hand upon the map.
"But something has been taken away from our certainty about it."
The traveller looked puzzled.
She continued.
"When a way of seeing works for a very long time, it becomes difficult to see the seeing."
She pointed to the road.
"We call this space."
She pointed to the succession of events marked along the road.
"We call this time."
She pointed to the links between events on the map.
"We call these causes."
She touched the small symbols that marked things.
"We call these properties."
The traveller looked at her.
"And they are not?"
"They are ways in which the world becomes intelligible to us."
She paused.
"That does not make them unreal."
"Then what is the danger?"
"The danger is forgetting the difference between a condition that allows us to see something and a thing that exists independently of that condition."
The traveller sat down.
After a while he said:
"Then perhaps I should not ask what an object is in itself."
The keeper smiled.
"Not so quickly."
He laughed.
She pointed to the map.
"Ask it if you wish. But first ask what must already be true for the question to make sense."
He looked again at the little circle representing the village.
"What would I have to assume?"
"That there is already a thing."
"And that it can be separated from everything else."
"Yes."
"And that there is somewhere in which it exists."
"Yes."
"And that there is some way of saying what belongs to it and what does not."
"Yes."
The traveller looked troubled.
"So the question carries all those assumptions with it."
"Often."
"And then asks what remains when we take them away."
The keeper nodded.
"That is where questions become strange."
The young traveller was silent for a long time.
Then he asked:
"What happened before time?"
The keeper laughed softly.
"You see?"
He laughed too.
"And what caused causation?"
"Exactly."
They sat beside the map until the light faded.
At last the traveller rolled it up.
"I think I understand."
The keeper looked at him.
"What do you understand?"
"That sometimes a question reaches beyond the place where the map can carry it."
The keeper nodded.
"Now you are beginning to understand the horizon."
The following spring, the young traveller became a keeper of paths himself.
Years passed.
He drew maps.
He taught children.
He marked roads and rivers and places where the ground became dangerous.
And, as the years went by, his maps became better.
People trusted them.
Eventually they trusted them so completely that they stopped asking how the maps had been made.
One evening, many years later, the old keeper found him standing beside a map on which he had worked for months.
"What are you looking for?" she asked.
"The edge."
She looked at the map.
"Why?"
"Because I think there is something beyond it."
"There is always something beyond the edge."
"Not the land."
He shook his head.
"I mean the way of seeing."
The old keeper smiled.
He had finally understood.
They walked together to the farthest road marked on the map.
Beyond it was a country neither of them had mapped.
The old keeper stopped.
"Well?"
The younger keeper looked at the blank space.
For the first time, he did not think of it as empty.
He did not think of it as unfinished.
He simply stood there.
The old map was in his hand.
The land was before him.
And somewhere between the two, something he had once mistaken for the world itself had begun to disappear.
He folded the map.
Then he stepped beyond its edge.
And the horizon moved with him.
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