"Tulse Luper arranged these drawings for me one Monday afternoon when he heard that I was ill." "This was one of the drawings he'd given me himself." "It's one of a pair." "He told me not to bother to look for the other one." "These two I'd received anonymously on different occasions through the post." "This one I bought." "I remember it cost me very little." "And these two were stolen, though not by me." "I was just the receiver." "This one I copied from a drawing at Bridzor and this one I did steal, from the man who looked after the owls at the Amsterdam zoo." "These two were given to me, probably as a birthday present." "Tulse Luper came back at 11 in the evening and told me this drawing was probably the one I would need first." "I finally left on the Tuesday morning, at about a quarter to two." "This particular map had at one time been very familiar to me." "I had always associated it with night." "Perhaps the map had hung on a bedroom wall somewhere." "I forget." "Astrogarth was the first measuring place." "Once past it, it was impossible to go back." "I had heard that one or two had been able to turn back just before they reached Astrogarth, but that was rare." "The second city was Canterlupis." "This was one of the catalogue drawings." "I bought a lot of them and kept them in a suitcase." "The paper was poor stuff." "Hesgarden." "It was in two parts, both of them silent." "I remember this man came with a letter accusing me of stealing eggs." "I never understood the map's relationship to the accusation." "I still don't, but I'm grateful for the map." "After Hesgarden came Manaphia, 34 miles from Astrogarth." "The road was very clearly marked, very red." "This drawing I remember illustrated a theory about blood oranges, or perhaps it was about pomegranates." "The fifth city was Balladrome." "This was a frontispiece to a novel by Hasper Fallbazz called The Ringed Woman." "Fallbazz was a pioneer naturalist, one of the first to promote ringing birds to check on their movements." "After some 20 years of this practice, in which time he and his wife must have ringed some 25,000 birds, he decided that the information gained was not to be trusted." "He concluded that information from a ringed bird was not the same as information from a bird." "Fallbazz tried to curb the enthusiasm he had helped to pioneer." "Half in earnest, half in jest, to draw a behavioural parallel, he wrote his erotic novel in which the heroine is ringed." "Fallbazz's wife did the illustrations, but they never appeared in the novel." "Where this illustration fits in the novel is not clear." "After Balladrome, there's Dormis, a sedate place." "Dormis was 79 miles from Astogarth and 33 from Hesgarden." "This drawing came by post, unsigned, on a birthday I had spent in bed with chickenpox." "Another of the catalogue drawings." "I was told to keep it on permanent loan by the security officer who stole it." "The scarlet brick road was still unmistakable." "This city is unnamed." "If it had a name, I forget it." "After one unnamed city, I came upon another." "This one had good pavements." "It surprised me a little." "It reminded me of a seaport, though it was far from the sea." "And then Antilipe." "According to Tulse Luper, Antilipe in Syria was home to a unique species of black maritime rook that mated with seagulls." "That was obviously another Antilipe." "Contorpis, the tenth city, 117 miles from Astrogarth." "My brother found this drawing in a desk he'd bought from a judge." "He had the drawing framed and glazed and hung it on the wall in his house." "The drawing was stolen by a woman, the companion of a guest at the christening of my brother's eldest daughter." "The woman hid the drawing under a shawl embroidered with peacocks." "As she was leaving in the crush of guests at the door, the glass in the frame broke, cutting her arm and her breast." "She fainted." "When she came to, she was very embarrassed, said her name was Correlegiano." "She offered a cheque to cover the damages." "According to my brother, the red on the road is blood, type A." "Tulse Luper suggested my journey through H needed 92 maps." "Anticipating my question, he suggested the time to decide what H stood for was at the end of the journey and by that time, it scarcely mattered." "This drawing had been found one day in my luggage," "I returned it to the hotel clerk." "There were no claimants and the hotel posted it on to me." "And this, I had been led to believe, was an unrealised plan for a park at Staines, with a bandstand." "It seemed indeed that the park had been realised, but not in Staines." "This drawing had belonged to my aunt." "For 57 years, I thought it was a plan of her garden." "She died of food poisoning after eating an omelette." "The map began to fade before I had crossed two thirds of the territory it represented." "All that remained was a mark that could have been a signpost or the skeleton of a windmill." "All those 13 maps whose territory I had passed through had faded and in their place on each sheet was the same mark, or one much like it." "I hurried till I was sure that I had reached the territory of the next map, the 14th." "It was a small drawing that I'd admired by a man who was an inspector of mazes." "I had expected it to be an invaluable asset, but it faded before I had walked less than a third of its territory." "The maps not only faded with use, they faded after the allotted time for their use had become exhausted." "I ran to keep pace with the 15th map." "It faded as I reached its furthest edge." "I hurried on." "I was 161 miles from Astrogarth," "I was using the 16th map and I was running." "More like A Run Through H." "I was encouraged by the sight of a bird." "If it could rest, so perhaps could I." "I slowed up, apprehensively." "This is a map made by an exiled pianist as a directive to the members of his band." "He could not foresee that his musical and topographical instruction should be used backwards." "As a cartographer, he was not appreciated in his own country." "I had sent away for a plan of Anascaul, and had received this map in return." "It was accompanied with a note saying Anascaul didn't exist, but would this do?" "It was too late to argue at the time, so I kept it." "I was never able to trace its identity until now." "The maps had stopped fading." "Unless there was some other reason, it looked as though I had discovered the correct walking pace." "This drawing was bought on my behalf from a traveller who said she had made the journey before." "I'd paid a lot for it." "I thought at the time any journey she might take would be worth taking." "The road was clearly marked." "Perhaps too clearly." "As a map, the drawing was worthless." "The image faded, but when it had gone, the paper was empty." "There was no mark, no cross, no skeleton of a windmill." "I had strayed to a dead end." "Tulse Luper said, if in need," "I should play this map like a blank in a card game." "It might get me out of trouble." "For encouragement, I had some reason to think that I had a guide." "The 21st map." "The map of a conscientious cartographer." "This map had been a legal orthodox buy from an antiquarian's bookshop." "It had been kept in a map cabinet, and exchanged in daylight for an authorised cheque." "There was a receipt." "Yet, for all that, I never felt the map was mine." "I had kept it hidden." "Perhaps that had helped preserve the pencil marks from fading." "Now indeed I was among fields, small fields surrounded by damp cobbled lanes." "There were enough possible routes to follow." "My daughter, as a child, on numerous occasions stood before this map and made imaginary journeys on it." "It was glazed." "One day, she scratched a route on the glass with a hard engraving tool." "I was angry, but I noted the journey and didn't replace the glass." "The journey she took is not the one that I was persuaded to take." "There had been more than one occasion when I'd nearly thrown this map away." "When he couldn't find it, Tulse Luper asked where it was." "He suggested my judgement was too much governed by other people." "This gullibility might have governed the number of maps I had to take with me." "By the same token, others might take less time than I deciding what the initial H was to stand for." "It didn't stand for heron." "I didn't like this drawing, either." "I'd found it in a hide." "It was frozen to the observation window." "I had reason to suppose that my guide had been scared off." "This drawing was supposed to have been by Erhaus Bewler but if so, then it's a fake." "It was obviously more valuable to me as a fake." "It saw me successfully into the territory of the next map, the 28th, though I was less and less inclined to walk there." "Map 28 was no fake." "A playing field marked out for an abandoned game and scattered with obstacles that made the game unplayable." "This was the map Tulse Luper gave me himself as a present on some anniversary of his own." "He told me I should need to use it twice to accustom myself to what was to come immediately after." "And the landscape did repeat itself." "There was probably another drawing to match this one." "I think Tulse Luper gave it to my brother." "In the other drawing, I was sure there were no obstacles on the pitch." "(wind)" "At the end of the field came the gate." "Tulse Luper called it the owl gate." "It was to introduce perhaps the most significant map, the Amsterdam map." "I had known in advance that this map would be significant." "Up until my possession of it, any accumulation of maps I might have made was unplanned, fortuitous." "It was only after I had been persuaded to steal this map, did I look for a map in everything I possessed and in most things I didn't possess as well." "I had no idea how to use it." "As far as I could see, no road was more clearly marked than any other." "Cautiously, I followed what I considered to be an amenable route, and soon had to retrace my path." "Up until I stole this map, I had made no mistakes collecting the right information for this journey." "Afterwards, my mistakes were legion." "I collected rubbish, worthless junk." "Tulse Luper, on the evening of my last illness, waded through that ephemera, frowning and tossing the papers like confetti." "Yet it was Tulse Luper who had cajoled me into possessing this map." "He said it was imperative that it should be mine." "This map had belonged, technically, to the keeper of the owls at the Amsterdam zoo." "(birdsong)" "The zookeeper's name was Van Hoyten, another H." "Before his job at the Amsterdam zoo, he'd lived at Assidium on the Bosphorus, favoured by metal smiths who hammered copper artefacts with a tool shaped like a wishbone." "Van Hoyten was a bird counter." "He counted the birds as they flew from Europe to Africa each autumn along their migration route across the Bosphorus." "(wind)" "The possibilities of following any route on this map were so numerous," "I wondered by what criterion I should make a choice." "There were no compass directions." "I could not depend on the top of the map being north." "(wind)" "A telescope was used to count the birds as they flew across the disc of the full moon." "Against the disc of the full moon, even white birds are black." "The birds were often two or three miles away and in some cases, were as small as a Scops owl." "Van Hoyten let owls go by uncounted." "They were immune from his count." "There was no point in counting what you already knew was your own." "Areas of this map were now becoming familiar." "So was the territory they represented." "Had they become familiar to other travellers?" "Were other travellers obliged to travel through the same country?" "There was no indication that they should." "They left me no signposts." "Perhaps other travellers had different maps of this territory, simpler and more straightforward maps." "Perhaps the country only existed in its maps, in which case, a traveller created the territory as he walked through it." "If he should stand still, so would the landscape." "I kept moving." "Anxiety about the map fading through wasting time could still prevent me from halting to satisfy such a prospect." "At Assidium, there were only four or five bird-counting nights a month." "On several of these, the moon would be obscured by cloud." "It might be possible to guarantee only 30 bird-counting nights a year." "The odds were still too high in Van Hoyten's favour." "For Tulse Luper reckoned a count was as good as a capture." "I hid the telescope." "I locked the observatory." "Three times, I lit fires in the observatory garden and heaped them with damp wood to hide the moon with smoke." "(high wind)" "On the map I continued to follow what I thought might be a sensible route." "If there had been cardinal points," "I was walking north, south, east and west indiscriminately, and I kept coming across the same places and the same events." "I slowed my pace, knowing that I was lost." "Van Hoyten had a lot of free time." "He collected feathers." "His room was full of them." "He hung them up like trophies." "When he was not collecting feathers or counting souls as they flew across the face of the full moon, he was compiling a catalogue, a catalogue of the migrating birds of the Northern Hemisphere." "Tulse Luper said it was important that Van Hoyten should never finish his catalogue of birds of the Northern Hemisphere." "He should be discouraged or he should be lured away from the Bosphorus." "The catalogue should be completed by some disinterested person." "An ornithologist with no ulterior motive." "Tulse Luper wrote suggesting I might find a suitable map for his wife as a present." "He knew that she was dying." "At the 92nd booth of the metalworkers' street in Assidium," "I saw this map." "I put down a deposit to the equivalent of half its price." "I wrote to Tulse Luper describing it and the street where I found it." "He curtly replied that it was of no use to his wife, but it was imperative that I should buy it for myself." "When I went back to do just that, the map had gone." "Three days later, it was pinned up in Van Hoyten's room." "(birdsong)" "I fell ill for six weeks with food poisoning." "At the end of autumn, I was offered a job as keeper of the owls at Amsterdam zoo." "Tulse Luper had recommended me." "I arrived in Amsterdam to find that the job had been taken, by Van Hoyten." "He also suggested to the zoo authority that I was a saboteur." "That I had three times tried to burn down the Bosphorus observatory." "I searched for his office to confront him with this." "He wasn't there, but the map was." "I left money to make up to the metal smith's price and I took the map." "By the time I had passed one point on this map nine times, it occurred to me I might in fact be marking time by arrangement, awaiting the convenience of future maps." "Maybe the time allowance for each map stretched forwards as well as back." "Perhaps I had now been walking through H too fast." "Van Hoyten stayed on as owl keeper of the Amsterdam zoo." "He'd been lured away from Assidium and I had been the lure." "When I returned to London, Tulse Luper said that no one would follow up the theft." "They would leave their pursuit until such time as I should need to use the map, like now." "Perhaps the owl keeper succeeded no more than to keep me waiting, for at the end of the ninth profitless journey," "I knew that the tenth would show an exit." "(wind)" "But even out of the maze its influence still persisted in a shadow story." "The yellow paper of this map is the protective wrapping of an X-ray film." "The map was made by a radiologist who said he was suffering from exposure to the X-ray machine." "He was a thief as well as a hallucinist." "He stole a jacket of mine." "In the pocket was my passport and the draft of a story," "The Lammergeyer and the Capercaillie." "The radiologist denied stealing and he had nothing I could steal back except his drawings, so I stole those." "He reported me." "I was dismissed, not for the drawings but for stealing the yellow paper which was hospital property." "This is a map that Tulse Luper found somewhere in the house." "I heard him in the cellar and the attic." "He returned covered in dust." "Sitting on the end of the bed, he spread out all the items he'd found." "He sorted and discarded, arranged and rearranged until he had the maps together in five sections." "Then he began to sort out an order for the maps in each section." "I asked him how he was to organise the material." "He said he had a thousand schemes and they would all come out in the same order." "This map in a sense was a commission." "I'd asked a friend to show me from the railway station to his house." "Not content with a few directions, he spent some time on a map filling it out with details not necessary for so short a walk." "As it happened the map proved worthless, because I arrived at the wrong station." "Since I first owned this map, the colours have darkened." "It was an estate agent's plan." "RED stood for "redevelopment"." "My wife took a drawing I had bought to be framed." "It was one I didn't know too well, but well enough to know that when it came back, it had been exchanged for another." "This is that replacement." "I said nothing to my wife, but I went to find the frame maker." "I couldn't find him." "I told my wife I'd passed the shop where she'd had the drawing framed." "She only looked surprised for a moment." "Six months later, it would have been impossible to verify either story because that part of Dresden was laid waste from the air." "This drawing is simpler than the one it was exchanged for and one word in the caption has been changed." "This is a detail of a portrait of a man with a hawk on his wrist." "My father paid £70 for it." "It was of his brother." "Painted in the landscape behind the figure was this road." "Tulse Luper calmly ripped the detail from the portrait and included it as map 46." "I don't remember this drawing, but I remember one like it that was destroyed in a fire." "My son dealt with the insurance." "Perhaps he arranged the replacement." "This was a lonely road." "I have no memory of owning the map though my wife's name is on the back and so is the date of my stay in the Bosphorus." "Intrigued by the map detail in my uncle's portrait," "I wrote to his widow to find if she knew anything else about the painter." "She sent me this drawing with a note saying when her husband had left her, it was the one map he left behind." "I don't remember this one." "It has a strong similarity to map 48." "The crosses are a later addition." "There's a note on the back about grazing geese." "And I don't remember this one." "Again, there is some writing on the back, some personal details that only I could have put there." "This map was drawn by a patient named Vogel who was hospitalised with Ménière's disease." "An orderly supplied Vogel with paper, took this drawing and others like it in exchange for favours and entered them for competitions in a popular ornithological magazine." "I was one of the competition judges and this was one of the few entries that I kept." "In six months with Vogel's drawings the orderly won a car, a weekend holiday at a bird sanctuary in the Camargue, £400 and a parrot." "The next three maps had been the property of Canton Remadol, an ornithologist and a pioneer aviator." "He designed kites based on his observations of seagulls." "The kites were often made of wastepaper from his workroom, paper which sometimes bore his designs and drawings." "This is such a strip." "I'm told it is a reworking of a flight plan of a much earlier conceptual aviator." "I took the route of the third alternative." "When asked about the likelihood of making an aircraft," "Remadol reputedly said it would be easier to breed giant seagulls and then ride the offspring." "Tulse Luper said the maps Remadol had collected for his final flight were taken from the most brilliant aeronautical drawings of the time." "Remadol crashed his last plane into a cliff at Hastings knocking my great-grandfather into the sea." "My great-grandfather had been collecting seagull eggs." "This is a plan from a bogus ecological textbook called Robinson Crusoe on Concrete Island." "It shows the water drainage system for an inclined concrete platform." "My landscape was not concrete, but the map was invaluable." "I know nothing about this one," "I don't remember receiving the postcard, nor did I send it." "The address on the back is unknown to me, as are most of the details of French history referred to on the front." "This ostensibly is the floor plan of a gallery where I had once arranged an exhibition on flight." "The red line was an instruction for a tracking film camera." "It now served me as a track to the 60th map." "This map had been given to me by a charter-flight steward in appeasement for a cancelled flight." "It had been given to him by an anatomist who had signed the passenger book in mirror writing." "Tulse Luper put in the arrows." "Along with my elder brother, I was offered as a prize the choice of one of several items laid out on a table at a fête." "My brother, showing off some newly acquired erudition, chose a drawing." "I regretfully felt obliged to follow suit and took this one." "Much later, Tulse Luper made some small changes and signed it." "Originally the two drawings were very alike, which at the time surprised me because, whilst my brother's choice was admired, mine was not." "It seems my brother, even at that age, he must have been eight, was making a decision that would be relevant." "My imitative choice had to be corrected." "This too had belonged to my brother." "He became an archaeologist." "I made the alterations this time." "Tulse Luper raised his eyebrows, but didn't interfere." "I followed the route with some difficulty." "It needed some interpretation and I left the territory it represented without regret." "It smelt of guano." "This map of the section of Southeastern Australia was reproduced in possibly 80,000 school textbooks." "I'd never supposed my version was different from any other." "Tulse Luper used this embellished photocopy to fix the chronology of the map that followed it, a journey on the plumage of a red-legged partridge." "Only after reaching the eye of this upside-down bird did Tulse Luper suggest I return to the Australian photocopy, align the eye of the bird with the letter I in its name and then proceed to point A." "For my present walk, the map was not especially clear." "I distrusted its usefulness and its place in the chronology." "Most of all, I was uneasy at Tulse Luper's lightness of manner, but the alphabetical path led me eventually to the territory of map 65." "A map sketched in laundry ink onto a ripped shirt collar sent from Ceylon to a cousin who was a milliner in the feather trade." "The information suggesting the drawing was authentic was also advice for me to quicken my pace." "I walked quickly, carrying the used maps in my left hand and the unused in my right." "(wind, geese call)" "Map 66." "There could have been books like this one in my grandfather's front room." "I spent a lot of time in that room, kept at a reasonable distance from adult conversation in the kitchen." "Maybe it was my grandfather who turned the title page into an instruction." "It was not that easy to follow." "This drawing, I do remember." "It was on the back of a old treasury envelope carrying an instruction about the prevention of pigeons roosting on government property." "This map seemed based as much on a speculative appreciation of landscape as on anything permanent." "And an inevitable recourse to a darkened copy of the past map was not that reassuring." "This map could only suggest the approximate position of riverbeds that had dried and flooded several times between the making of the map and the journey I was taking." "But the lack of a clear route was not causing me especial disappointment." "I was not remembering these maps at all." "As the stack diminished, I recognised less and less." "The maps offered alternative routes." "Their magnanimity was not helpful." "A map that tried to pin down a sheep trail was just credible, but it was an optimistic map that tried to fix a path made by the wind or a path made across the grass by the shadow of flying birds." "The usual intentions of cartography were now collapsing or the route itself was becoming so insecure that mapping it was a foolhardy occupation." "I was nearing the end of the journey and the maps represented less and less distance on the ground." "Three miles." "Two miles." "The final mile." "The last instruction." "It was drawn on the torn envelope that had been wrapped around the maps of the last section, a bonus." "I walked the last half-mile across a nearly featureless landscape, guided by a few stains and some hesitant pencil lines." "The finish to that line was marked by the ubiquitous signpost or maybe it was the skeleton of a windmill." "(birds screech)" "I had arrived." "It was Tuesday morning, early, at about quarter to two." "I had used 92 maps and had travelled 1,418 miles." "(birds screech)" "Subtitles:" "IMS"