And so the IMW, now subsidiary in importance, started to wither and to die. The United Nations took over the project and tried to inject some enthusiasm, but to little avail. By the 1960s only about four hundred of the sheets were fully finished and released (many countries suddenly got cold feet about offering the maps to the project, even though they had been completed), and though each of the finished sheets had the appearance of great elegance, most were out-of-date by the moment they hit the streets.

  To incorporate all of the 37 billion acres of the world’s land surface into the project would require more than a thousand sheets. By contrast, the ICAO aviation maps, shorn of all but the most vital information and so much simpler to make, extended across all the land surface, all the myriad islands in mid-ocean, and all the oceans, too. They were eventually to be named the World Aeronautical Charts. Maybe they were a little wanting of cartographic elegance, but they were easy to bring up-to-date and presented all the essentials, and turned out to be wholly fit for purpose in a way that their hapless IMW cousins were clearly not.

  Albrecht Penck’s dream of 1891 finally submitted to its melancholy and officially euthanized end in mid-December 1986. That was when a U.N. “ad hoc group of experts” met in Bangkok, declared that the IMW was of no further value or need, and formally let member states know they need devote no more time or energy to producing it. A complete set of their combined efforts was handed for posterity to the American Geographical Society, which curated the sheets for some years at its various grand headquarters in Manhattan; but when the society—not as flashy and well funded as the National Geographic Society in Washington, and suffering from the current popular indifference to geography—moved to a more modest home in Brooklyn, the maps were transferred to the all-encompassing cartographic library at the University of Wisconsin’s campus in Milwaukee, available to be seen and marveled at by anyone wishing and willing to make the trek to the upper west bank of Lake Michigan.

  Their curator, proud to preside over such a collection, slides out the hundreds of virgin sheets one by one from their rows of steel cabinets. And yes, they do indeed present a wondrously artistic vision of the world’s solid surface. But they show only a fraction of it, by no means the world’s totality. That it took the combined and concerted efforts of mankind so long, the better part of a working century, to make a portrait of its real estate holdings that is so circumscribed suggests many things: laziness, indifference, a lack of political will, the sheer complexity of the subject, the logistical cat-herding nightmare of persuading so many rivals to set differences aside in the interests of planetary communion.

  Much the same trials afflict a similar, more recently commenced effort to map yet another land surface—the submerged underneath of the oceans, the landscape of the seabed. Such charts as we have made thus far show the details of the seabed to a resolution several orders of magnitude less than those satellites have allowed us to produce of the surface of the moon or of Mars. So a concerted attempt, principally financed by the Japanese Nippon Foundation, is now under way to produce a general bathymetric chart of the world ocean, such that in time the whole solid surface of our planet is mapped, whether it be exposed or submarine, and we have a knowledge of the entirety of our planet, every acre of it—the 37 billion acres that are exposed, or the 90 billion more that languish beneath the sea. It remains a vision, a dream, a hope.

  4

  At the Edges of Worlds

  The two frontier towns are less than a cannon-shot distant, and yet their people hold no communion. The Hungarian on the north, and the Turk and the Servian on the southern side of the Save are as much asunder as though there were fifty broad provinces that lay in the path between them. Of the men that bustled around me in the streets of Semlin there was not, perhaps, one who had ever gone down to look upon the stranger race dwelling under the walls of that opposite castle.

  —ALEXANDER KINGLAKE, Eothen (1844)

  There is a zone of twenty precisely measured feet of naked North American land, kept strictly clear of people and trees and all invasive botany and on which no new buildings may ever, without permission, be erected nor any ditch dug, nor any road or bridge built, nor any pipe or electrical cable established, and in the exact middle of which stand a large number of white granite markers, a line connecting which officially demarcates the mutually agreed boundary that separates the Dominion of Canada from the Republic of the United States of America.

  This is an international land border—at 5,525 miles the longest in the world. There is currently no wall or fence or watchtower built on or along or across the line, except for those movable gates or barriers that have been constructed at the 105 roadways where it is legal to pass through the border, and at the ends of the fourteen tunnels or bridges where the boundary runs along a river or across a lake. It is said, proudly but these days quite erroneously, to be undefended and thus the longest such undefended border on the planet. The line that demarcates the two neighboring states has come about as the result of a number of complicated negotiations and subsequent agreements that have been signed during a lengthy period from the late eighteenth until early twentieth centuries by plenipotentiaries initially from the courts in such places as London and St. Petersburg, and with the signing ceremonies conducted in variety of cities, most of them in Europe, but with the American capital city of Washington, D.C., party to nearly all of them.

  By the latest count there are 316 other international land borders around the world. These divisions extend—usually in ragged fashion, and seldom in the kind of straight lines that bound so much of the United States—for something like 154,000 miles. Some of those miles are marked by natural division lines (rivers, mountain chains, swamps) while some others are lines drawn almost at random by politicians and civil servants. There are also 193 island-nations in current existence, but these do not by their very nature have land borders, except for those—Haiti, for example, St. Martin,* Papua New Guinea, and Ireland among others—that sport such a boundary within their own maritime territorial fastnesses.

  Each one of the world’s 317 land borders is defined and agreed to, formalized as a result of agreements between those countries that abut each other, as neighbors; and each has been surveyed with, in most cases, a mutually agreed level of precision. To read a table of these boundaries and their history is to learn much, in the same way that stamp collecting, now in popular disfavor, used to teach much about the world’s historical geography. One can derive great pleasure in picking at random from the United Nations list: learning of how, for instance, the Albanian border with Montenegro was first agreed to by a delegation of Turkish pashas who went to Germany and signed the Treaty of Berlin in 1878; that the northwestern border of Myanmar, separating it from the Indian state of Manipur, was the result of a victory over the Arakanese by the Burmese army back in 1558; that in 1821 an entity called the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves annexed a free-spirited confection of small states gathered around the Río de la Plata’s estuary and known at the time as the Liga Federal, and in doing so set up a line still recognized today as the border between the modern countries of Argentina and Uruguay; and that the border between Ireland and Britain came about in 1921 when the twenty-six southern counties of the Irish Republic, all with a majority population of Roman Catholics, declared an independence from Britain which the six mostly Protestant-majority counties of the northeast of the island could not and would not accept, and who thus remained loyal, if troubled, and protected behind what would become a highly militarized border, for much of the century beyond.

  Some borders are of great antiquity. As to which was the first—there are many candidates. There was probably a time during the formation of early civilizations when, say, that in the Nile Valley expanded outward like penicillin in a petri dish, and collided, as it were, with its Persian equivalent spreading outward from the Fertile Crescent. The point of close encounter of these two spreading human populations could well have been near where stand today’s cities of Basra and Abadan, the waterlands of the Marsh Arabs, as well as the site of ancient Ur of the Chaldees. But no archaeological remnants of a formal border has ever been found in the local estuarine sands—just oil fields and argument, the common coin of this much despoiled corner of the world.

  It is said by the people of Andorra that their seventy-mile long Pyrenean frontier with France is the oldest established such entity in the world, having been jointly agreed, written into a signed charter, and then marked out with boulders on September 8, 1278. Are there contenders still more venerable than this? Hadrian’s Wall, for example, which the Roman legions scythed across the windblown fields of the far north of England, was begun more than a thousand years earlier, and can fairly be said to have been at the least a precursor of England’s present-day border with Scotland. The Great Wall of China is mainly a fourteenth-century creation (though some of its sections were built fifteen hundred years earlier) and it can be seen as a national border, too. There is an important difference, though. In Andorra, rulers on both sides of the proposed border agreed to its delineation; but neither Hadrian nor the Ming wall builders ever won the agreement of the inhabitants beyond their constructions, who never signed off on the notion that this should be a jointly accepted and formal boundary. The line was unilaterally imposed rather than mutually accepted—a difference suggesting that the Andorran claim to primacy is most probably reasonable and legitimate.

  The great majority of the world’s land borders were fashioned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a fierce acceleration of nation building got under way in 1850, became territorial mayhem between 1875 and 1899—largely in consequence of European adventurism and imperialism—and reached its climacteric in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when 50,000 miles of extra borders, almost a third of those currently inscribed in our atlases, were agreed to and delineated. Many of them were components of the new postwar world order that was drawn up by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. A flurry of new boundary-making etched its imprint onto maps and charts after the Second World War, and a fair additional number of lines were added after the Balkan conflicts remade such ancient entities as Kosovo, Bosnia, and North Macedonia where once there had been more simply the single republic of Yugoslavia. But then, however, the territory-making energies became largely dissipated, and now most of the world’s borderlines are more or less fixed and stable. Maybe the names of the countries they enfold change from time to time, and the politics within often alters on a whim. But to all of this the land itself remain sturdily indifferent and unmoved, the human behavior played out on its surfaces merely trivia. Except, of course, where human behavior induces changes to the ferocity of the weather and the levels of the sea, and land may then fall victim to the climate, and has to alter its shape and size as a result.

  Yet the boundaries of all too many of today’s countries have less to do with nature—as with China and India, separated by the Himalayan range, or as with Chile and Argentina, divided by the Andes—than they do with the seemingly random apportionment of the hinterlands by politicians, generals, or faraway officials. The United States is one such, its borders being in large part geometric—a straight line drawn for many hundreds of miles and having little or nothing to do with any physical need for separation. A section of its border with Canada, the hundred-mile reach of the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York across from the Ontario towns of Kingston and Cornwall, runs along what is an actual physical barrier, with the centerline drawn in mid-river above the thalweg, the deepest point of the stream. Four of the five Great Lakes can similarly be said to offer natural barriers, but the borderlines themselves have been drawn across Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario in straight and decidedly non-natural ways, paying no heed to topography at all.

  The situation of the Republic of India is even more spectacularly detached from physical reality, since its borders on both its western and eastern sides were determined by nothing more than the exacting cartographic effort of a civil servant based in London, and who drew the lines on a map in a scant seven weeks in the high summer 1947. His work, resulting in a sudden and near arbitrary division of the countrysides of the Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east, led to an orgy of killings and rapine quite unanticipated in its scale and ferocity, and never to be forgotten.

  The man proximately responsible for the tragedy of India’s partition was Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a bespectacled and mild-mannered Welsh lawyer who had never before been to India—nor ever traveled east of Paris, indeed—when he got the call. His instructions were as brutal as they were simple: break India apart on religious grounds that would satisfy the demands of the country’s wily Muslim leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, for a separate state. The demand for Radcliffe to do the job—made because of his repute as director-general of Britain’s Ministry of Information—came from the figure whom history has more justly blamed for the debacle, and who was the ultimate decision maker: Louis Mountbatten, the final viceroy of India.

  Lord Louis—handsome and debonair, spangled with more medals than wars were ever fought, bathed during his long lifetime by a steadily increasing cascade of public reverence—enjoyed a career that took him from being a purported naval hero (played, barely disguised, in a laudatory film by Noël Coward), to a victorious wartime commander in chief in the war with Japan, to viceroy of India and, besides, the uncle of and adviser to Prince Charles, the future British sovereign. But then he was assassinated at the hands of the Irish Republican Army in 1979, and ever since his reputation has swiftly tumbled, not least because of the heartless manner in which he broke India apart, and how he presided without much evident distress over the consequent rioting and rampage which took a million lives, at the very least. His repute is now in such tatters that when an Indian filmmaker looked closely at the manner in which Radcliffe, as head of the two boundary commissions that drew the dividing lines, actually partitioned the country, the genteel British actress who played Lady Radcliffe remarked that Mountbatten was thought of so comprehensively crooked that “if he swallowed a nail he’d shit out a corkscrew.”

  The film’s young Indian director, Ram Madhvani, made his ten-minute dramatized documentary to depict a 1966 drawing room in Warwickshire, with a retired and nearly blind Radcliffe first being telephoned by the BBC to be told that W. H. Auden, no less, had just written a poem about him and his attempt—despite being neither a cartographer nor an administrator, or in any way familiar with India—to pry apart the countries.

  Sir Cyril Radcliffe, an eminent British lawyer who had never been east of Paris, was the eccentric choice to draw the boundaries of partitioned India. The orgies of killing that resulted shattered him. He refused all pay and burned his notes.

  He is at first flattered by the sudden attention, the sudden jolt to his otherwise peaceful retirement. But then his wife, bent on consoling him, says that the poem is anything but flattering, and in the brief and unbearably poignant film she proceeds to read it to him, allowing the viewer to see a decent man being slowly shattered by a memory of the terrible effects of his having so broken apart a hitherto unfractured land.

  Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,

  Having never set eyes on this land he was called to partition

  Between two peoples fanatically at odds,

  With their different diets and incompatible gods.

  “Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late

  For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:

  The only solution now lies in separation.

  The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,

  That the less you are seen in his company the better,

  So we’ve arranged to provide you with other accommodation.

  We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,

  To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.”

  Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day

  Patrolling the gardens to keep assassins away,

  He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate

  Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date

  And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,

  But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect

  Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,

  And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,

  But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,

  A continent for better or worse divided.

  The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot

  The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,

  Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

  The two boundary lines that Radcliffe and his team of mapmakers drew, working on the dining tables beneath the ever whirling fans of the old deodar-wood house up in the cool of Simla, snaked with passionless authority through the wheat fields of the Punjab and the rice paddies of Bengal—creating a Muslim-dominated West Pakistan and a similarly Muslim-majority East Pakistan. Immediately after the borders were announced on August 17, 1947—two days following the declared independence of India and the formal lapse of British rule—surges of panicked millions began, in a mad and barely controllable rush of humanity, to reach those countries to which their religions now said they belonged. Muslims in Lucknow fled wildly to the presumed safety of Pakistan; Hindus and Sikhs trapped in Lahore battled to get across to Delhi and Amritsar and the supposed sanctuary of India. It was an unutterably and months-long three-way exodus, quite terrible in its scale and bloodshed, quite shameful for the British who first set the process in motion, and with the apportionment of consequent blame justified, widespread, and near endless.