Hic Finis Chartae Viaeque

'Here ends the map, here ends the known way'.

My holiday reading includes a collection of essays by Charles Nicholl: 'Traces Remain'. One of these essays, 'Conversing with Giants', dissects an account of travels in the New World by a member of Magellan's expedition. This account was first made available in the 1520s and then in various versions over the succeeding centuries. Nicholl seeks to understand the mixture of the fantastic and the mundane that it comprises. He succeeds in explaining how the practical traveller and the fabulist merge together in an encounter with a Patagonian native: the 'giant' of the essay's title. It is a superb feat of imagination and intellectual analysis.

I am drawn particularly to a phrase from the account 'hic finis chartae viaeque'; to travel, literally, beyond the charted way. These dry words encapsulate the immensity of the endeavour. To step out beyond everything that is known, into a new world of uncertainties. A world in which anything is possible and even giants are to be expected. To take this step without the messages of travellers who have gone before, with limited expectation of return, with no ability to call on additional resources, only, perhaps, with the consolation of faith.

Sometimes when I dream, or at any rate when I remember my dreams, I feel myself in a void. I am swimming, or perhaps floating, the precise sensation is unclear. All around is water, or space. There are no people, borders, edges, landmarks or directions. I have stepped off the map, off the known way. It is a frightening, disorienting experience. I wake and am rescued, tumbled with relief into the familiar. What seems extraordinary is not the giants but the men and women who would willingly enter into that condition of maplessness. Heroes, explorers, artists, scientists.