Hours of the Cartographer

ere begins the office of those who draw the edges of the known world, to be said at the hour of Lauds when the ink is cold and the candle short. Let the hand be steady and the coast be true, for a river placed one finger wrong drowns a village that trusted the vellum.

And where the surveyor's knowledge fails, let him write not here be dragons but here I did not go, which is the more honest beast and the harder to draw.

Written at the abbey of Saint Brendan, in the year of the great comet, by a brother whose name the mice have eaten.