As I proceeded north the height of the giant blocks diminished — or the defiles between them rose — and a few kilometers farther on the canyons ascended to the height of the blocks. I drove over a fractured plain, a sort of crazed plateau surrounded by jagged hills not much higher than it. It was the inversion of the maze: low ridges crossed each other everywhere on this plateau, dividing it into frozen ponds and drifts of sand; Passage over this ground was difficult, and the tracks skirted it to the west, leading me to another plateau, one split by fissures or crevasses so that to continue north the track had to wind in big S’s. Here I ran into difficulty. The land was exposed to the wind, and in the fissures and etch pits were frozen ponds, surrounded by icy Syrtis grass, cushions of sandwort and rock jasmine, stiff leaf sedge, and boulders dotted with lichen of several colors. In this weird Arctic meadow the tracks were impossible to trace. I drove back to the last point I had been sure of seeing them — on one of the eskerlike ridges dividing the depressed plain — but once there, my own car’s tracks marred the landscape ahead, and I saw no others. No other direction seemed feasible; to veer right was to return to the ridged plain, to turn left was to drop back into the maze that the old tracks had worked out of. It seemed most likely that the road had crossed the crevassed plateau I had driven onto, and that in the last century the tracks had been destroyed by erosion and deposition.

So I was on my own. But I was loath to believe that. I got out of the car and ranged forward on foot, inspecting each route between fissures for sign of the road. Nothing. The rough jumble of peaks to the north might protect a canyon section of the road enough for it to reappear — or so I hoped — and in the last hour of daylight I drove north across the plateau, zigging and zagging to avoid fissures. When blocks began to dot the plateau like immense erratics on a dusky morraine, I slowed the car and kept close watch. I saw only a pebbly broken plain, which became canyon mouths as the blocks became more frequent and continuous. I drove up one anxiously; then for no reason I looked up at the left wall of the new canyon, and there, dug into the rock like three cracks, was an arrow, like so:

I laughed aloud. “Thank you very much,” I said. “I was wondering about that.” I drove on, but immediately I saw that the shadows of late afternoon would obscure any sign of the trail. I backed out of the canyon onto the plain to have a view for the evening, and stopped for camp beside one of the frozen ponds. The evening mirrors were pinpricks in a burgundy sky. I heated some beef soup, dipped crackers in it. After eating I sipped a cup of brandy, and located my position on the map. The fissured plain was clearly marked, an island in rougher terrain. The red dot was still a good distance to the north. The sky darkened to blackberry, the mirrors winked out over a horizon like a row of black teeth. The stars glowed yellow, making the clear dome of the car a planisphere. Sleep was difficult. Late in the night I jerked awake and knew I had been speaking with Emma, in a long conversation, a crucial one. What can you offer, she said. I tried to remember it; the starlit chaos, a vast jumble of black and gray, disoriented me, and even Emma’s last words fled. The whole dream forgotten. And so much of our waking lives are lost in the same way. I felt a pang of grief for the way we live, for all that we go through, and can never return to.

When the mirror dawn came I ate some cereal, and at true dawn I started the car and hummed up the arrow canyon, determined to find the road again. The canyon led to another stone maze, with forks at every turn that might have been paths through to the north; but there were no signs of passage to show me the way. I drove back to the arrow and considered what to do. Studying the map, it seemed to me that I could navigate my own way to the red dot. It was about sixty or seventy kilometers away, and the terrain in between did not appear markedly different from that I had already crossed. It was midmorning already, and I didn’t have an endless supply of air; in fact, my choice was to press on without the road, or turn back.

So I resolved to press on without the tracks. The rest of that morning I made good time north. The tumbled-down stone city I entered seemed to have split into hexagonal “city blocks”: a dogleg of thirty degrees right, followed by the same to the left, brought me time after time to Y-shaped canyon intersections where I could make the same choice again. Then a long broad fault allowed me to drive directly north for several kilometers, pausing only to maneuver over slides. My spirits rose, and with them my hopes (and a bit of fear): perhaps I would reach the region of the red dot that very day.

But I had forgotten that maps do not contain very much of reality. In the Aureum Chaos it would have been more accurate to leave a blank, with the legend “This is chaos — terra incognita — no map can show it and be faithful to its nature.” For I drove into a narrow valley where the map indicated I could continue northward and downward to the center of the chaos, the bottom of that huge bowl—

And the valley ended in an escarpment. Not a very tall one, but tall enough — ten or twelve meters — and it extended east and west for as far as the eye could see. The whole land took a step down, in a sheer drop. A cliff!

Angrily I pulled out the map. In the appropriate area was a contour line — in fact two of them, drawn together, in a dark line that I had taken for an index contour. Disgusted, I tossed the map to the floor. Contour line or no, the escarpment was there; I could drive no farther.

For nearly an hour I sat there and thought. Then I packed some food into the survival cart, filled its water tank, filled my field suit with its maximum load of oxygen: a hundred hours, on minimum flow. In the drawers of the cart I put map, bivouac tent, lamp, etc., and then I shoved the cart out of the car’s lock. The rush of cold air filled my lungs, but it was warmer than I had expected; there was more air down in this sink than I was used to.

The car’s trunk contained a rope ladder and a big square flag of lime-green nylon. I used the ladder to lower the cart down the cliff. Rocks served to hold down the corners of the green flag, and I dropped the unsecured end over the side. Then I climbed down the rope ladder’s metal rungs. The flag stood out against the cliffside clearly enough, and I tied its two bottom corners down with line so it couldn’t be blown back over the top by a north wind. Satisfied, I took another look at the map, put it in my thigh pocket, and set off hiking, pulling the little cart behind me.

Now there was no chute too narrow, no pass too steep. I hiked almost directly north. According to the map the red dot was about fifteen kilometers away, so I would have to hurry. But I had started late in the day, and soon the sun fell, and I had to use the mirror dusk to pull the bivouac tent from the cart and inflate it. That done, I climbed through the little lock and pulled the cart in after me. I fixed and ate a meal rapidly, as if I were going to be able to hike again when I was finished.

It was a cloudy night. Through scudding breaks the stars twinkled, and Deimos flew eastward like an omen. I could not sleep; hours passed; I was surprised to wake and find that I had been drowsing in the mirror dawn. I slipped out of the tent and the shock of frigid air burst my senses awake. Soon after the tent was back in the cart the sun rose, and I started hiking again.

Hours passed, and there was nothing for me in the world but that maze of canyons and the map. It is a form of grace to become nothing but a task; one can believe in meanings because they are all that exist. At each fork in the system of giant fissures I got out the map and made a choice. The sun overhead warmed the air, and ice on the clumps of Syrtis grass turned to drops of water, sparking like prisms in the light. Icicles hanging off rocks dripped, and the surfaces of the ice ponds got slick and smooth. Junipers and needle grass filled cracks, and sprays of saxifrage and gentian surprised me with their color. Sometimes it was hard to match the terrain to the map, which was too small-scaled for my purpose. Estimating heights and distances in the dense amber air was difficult; at times I had a prospect of fifty meters, other times I could see all the way across the chaos; what appeared to be mountains in the distance often proved to be blocks just over the next ridge, and vice versa. Each correspondence I made between my location and a point on the map was more of a guess than the last — but once, in the afternoon, I climbed a tall rock and had a look around, and the view corresponded perfectly to a point on the map five or six kilometers southwest of the dot. Full of confidence I hiked on.