XVIII. MAKING MAPS OF THE WORLD
After an era of drawing maps of the United States my companion took to drawing maps of the world, supporting them by mermaids and making them fly by north-westerly and north-easterly angels, and he wrote original couplets and hid them in hollow trees and under stones. As Shelley made paper boats in the Bay of Naples he made maps and hid them—his pet hobby for a number of days.
One verse asked Atlas if he did not find the world heavier since the Treaty of Versailles.
“I hope you made a copy of it before hiding it,” said I.
“Oh, no; stray leaves of poetry, rewards for seekers,” said he. Celebrated mountaineers have been putting copper boxes with their signatures on the tops of the mountains this year; Vachel has been leaving original poems in the valleys.
We set off from Sun Mountain for the high walls of the Canadian line. Vachel was in no passion for climbing, and confessed that if he were a woman, he would, at this point in our adventure, “lie down on the floor and scream.” So our progress was slow and punctuated by long waits. We went through tree thickets and breast-high flowers and through tearing thorns, and we came to many red-rock promontories. Rocks grew up out of the jungle and topped the highest trees, and we climbed them and looked out from their smooth, wind-swept summits and listened to the bears, and Vachel, with paper and pencil, drew maps and put Czecho-Slovakia in the scheme of things, and asked the God who made the world where Turkestan might be.
At length, at noon, we came unto a mighty cliff, an end of the world, rosy red and flamingly joyful, but very final. The poet was a quarter of a mile behind me, and I watched him patiently grubbing his way through the exuberant green, trackless jungle, hit in the face by branches, choked up to the fork of his legs by the weeds. And when he came to the end of the world he asked no questions but just sat down and began drawing a map. “Where,” asked he, “is Seven Rivers Land and the Desert of Pamir?”
I left him sitting down below and began climbing the giddy cliff with a tin can in my hand. For growing like wall-flowers on the rocks above were dwarf raspberry bushes all hung with tiny rosy lights—and these were fruits. I got up to them and standing on half-inch ledges and holding to twigs and weeds I picked a cupful of the hot berries all half-cooked by the sun’s rays. And when I got down again we had a wonderful repast of raspberries and sugar.
When we resumed tramping we crossed a crag-strewn valley, which was very rough on our boots. My boots were cracking; Lindsay’s were very floral. His held out a little while longer, but mine died that day. As we each carried two pairs of boots we were prepared for the emergency.
Mine had been a stout pair of pre-war boots (Americans please read “shoes”). I used them first in North Norway and Russia. I tramped in them in France. They were repaired first by a Russian at Kislovodsk in the Caucasus; repaired for the second time in Georgia by a negro cobbler. For I did Sherman’s march and walked from Atlanta to the sea in them in 1919. And they were repaired for the last time by a Frenchman in Hazebrouck last year. I had tramped in them over the battlefields of Gallipoli, and had worn them when the weather was bad in Constantinople, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, Warsaw, and almost every other capital of Europe.
“We must burn them,” said Vachel, “and have a special ceremony. These are no ordinary shoes (Englishmen please read ‘boots’) to be abandoned in the wilds without the meed of some melodious tear.” So we burned one on a high flaming fire with young pine-shoots for incense, and the other we threw into a rushing mountain torrent, and bade it continue its world journey to the world’s end.
We lay stretched on our blankets by the pine fire that night and talked of the world. We arrived at some ideas. “You are not drawing the map merely as part of a geography lesson,” said I. “You are drawing the poetry of it.”
A poetical map of the world has never yet been drawn. “It should have ships on its oceans and lighthouses on its rocks and mermaids under it, and stars over it,” said Vachel. “Imagine how Blake would have drawn it.”
First, you put in the North and South Poles, symbols of man’s love of the inaccessible and the paradox of his striving life; then Cape Horn, stormiest point in the world, cape of innumerable wrecks, of the innumerable adventures of daring sailors. Then put in the Panama Canal, symbol of utilitarianism and our modern life. Draw in the Bering Strait, which is the pre-historic link of the Old World and the New, and then the Rocky Mountains, which the red men climbed.
Then draw in a dotted line the keel track of Columbus over the ocean and put an eye upon a peak in the Darien looking downward and outward to the great Pacific. Draw the Mason and Dixon line. Draw 54° 40´—the “fifty-four forty or fight” line. Then for the old world, make the coast-line of China and then mark the Chinese Wall built to keep out the Huns, then draw the caravans of the hordes, and may arrows fly over the desert of Asia, spitting against Bokhara and Samarkand, spitting against the empire of Darius, spitting against the Scythians, the Slavs, stampeding the Goths and the North Men and ruining Rome and starting the modern world!
You must put in Athens the birthplace of the ideal, and Marathon and then Rome, the birthplace of materialism, the capital of capitals, seat of the Caesars. And then St. Helena, symbol of the doom of would-be Caesars.
Mark in the mysterious Nile, and the place where the Sphinx looks out from the sand. Mark Bethlehem and then Jerusalem——
Thus we schemed and mused and made many maps in fancy, and we took to ourselves just before the stars said good-night the title Geo. Ast.—geographical astrologers.
“I dare you to register as such,” said Vachel, “when we get out of all this and reach a hotel at last.”
Poor old world, you’re a playground.
And we are the children who romp in you now.
Those maps of you are wrong
Which show trade winds
Instead of winds of inspiration,
Where names of business-places are in bold black print
And railway lines are ruled,
And capitals are marked with blots
And other places are invisible.
THE EAGLE SEES WHAT IS IN THE PIT