Solitudinem faciunt, mappam apellant
-With apologies to Tacitus
Only Borges would have understood why the British made hundreds of mostly empty maps of Sudan, from the Sand in the far north to the Sudd in the far south. The northernmost maps were drawn at the scale of 1:250,000, or 1 inch to 4 miles, and show no topography, no habitation, no vegetation, no physical relief, as if they are not maps at all but rather depictions of what is visible in a blinding sand storm. They may as well have been on a scale of 1:1, or nothing. They made a desert and call it a map, that only the blind Borges would have been able to read.
