FOUR: THE TREASURE MAP          There were several additions of a later date; but, above all, three crosses of red ink two on the north part of the island, one in the south-west, and, beside this last, in the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand, very different from the captain's tottery characters, these words: "Bulk of treasure here."          Over on the back, the same hand had written this further information:          Tall tree, Spy-glass shoulder, bearing a point to the N. of N.N.E.          Skeleton Island E.S.E. and by E.          Ten feet. The bar silver is in the north cache; you can find it by the trend of the east hummock, ten fathoms south of the black crag with the face on it.          The arms are easy found, in the sand hill, N. point of north inlet cape, bearing E. and a quarter N.                   Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson.          Second to the right, and straight on till morning. That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions. Peter, you see, just said anything that came into his head.          Peter Pan. Sir James Barrie          In former times, the treasures of Georgian culture had been carried up to Svaneti, to be held safe from the plundering forays of invading armies who chased gold and silver icons, illuminated gospels, jewelled goblets, carved- wood panels, coins. The Svans had served not only as the creators but as the guardians of the country's treasures. But unknown almost to itself, Svaneti had conserved also the ancient blood that had fuelled the arteries of Georgia, the mysterious alchemy, the old power that Saint Nina had found threatening and, with her new religion, had sought to quell. (Source unknown)          The world is Dino Bravo's golf course. You sense, as you see him making his rounds of the Bravo District, stopping to swing his seven iron or make knees together feet apart shuffling movements to putt minor pieces of rubbish into the gutters, that he overlays golfing greens onto his daily existence and divides the Bravo District up into eighteen mental holes. Happy Hour had been starting every afternoon with Dino Bravo giving Gallifrey a golf lesson in the courtyard, using the Elvis Presley Invitational Tournament seven iron that he won in Vegas, thirty years ago. Gallifrey swung with incredible concentration and an almost complete lack of co-ordination, the golf club flying out of her hands and into the fountain. The rats, flat on their stomachs lying next to the fountain, glowered, waiting for the golf lesson to be over so that the elderly ladies would return to the courtyard spilling their tea-cake dipped in rum. Crouched by Gallifrey's feet, gazing at the base of the golf club, the mathematicians rallied round to offer statistical assistance on the trajectory of her shots, on the arc and velocity of the golf ball that did not exist to be hit.          Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, said Eccles, helpfully, his words punctuated by a series of hiccuping giggles that ended in a long, hmmmmmmm..          Ah yes, added Bloodnok. Quantum theory shows that nature cannot be separated from the person observing it.          We can build many universes in our mind. In fact, the task of the theoretical physicist is to construct possible universes to tell us what could be. The task of the experimental and observational scientist is to see what is - to tell us which of these possible universes we actually inhabit. Reading the Mind of God. James Trefil.          The Banner of King Death. The traditional design was a white skull and crossed thigh bones on a black ground. This was an old symbol of mortality, commonly used in the gravestone art of the time, and was not peculiar to piracy. In fact, the pirates probably took the symbol from merchant captains who often drew the skull and crossed bones in the margins oftheir ships'l ogs to indicate the death of a crewman. Other popular designs included the skeleton (a human anatomy) holding a glass of punch in one hand and a sword in the other, a dart dripping blood, or an hourglass. The flag was intended to terrify the pirates' prey, of course, but, as Rediker points out, ‘its triad of interlocking symbols death, violence, limited time - simultaneously pointed to meaningful parts of the seaman's experience and eloquently bespoke the pirates' own consciousness of themselves as preyed upon in turn. Pirates of the West Indies.          Au moved through the lobby making small-talk with the hotel guests gathered for Happy Hour with a kind of studied charm he'd inexpertly copied from Dino Bravo. Au leaned in close to people and wobbled his head and rolled his eyes, managing to appear unstable rather than alluring.          That's Exapno Mapcase the famous scoundrel and owner of The Blues In Orbit, Au told a man drinking an enormous glass of magnificent wine from Kakheti. The-tartan he wears is the colour of the ancient Transcaucasian Leopard. He is the living embodiment of the mythology of the city. He is rumoured to be a descendant of the pirate, El Ned. Au moved to a table near the open fire, where Exapno Mapcase was standing, regaling Dino Bravo and Gaflifrey with a long and involved story with sight gags and elaborate subclauses, his arms flapping, his words making twists and turns, cutlery flying in all directions, while they looked on in enraptured concentration. Out of the comer of his one good eye, Exapno Mapcase noticed Au mimicking his acting out of the story and cuffed him affectionately over the ear.          There's an echo in here, he said to the boy, who grinned foolishly.          Are you telling the story about me going into battle with El Ned? Exapno Mapcase asked Au. The boy looked sheepish. Well, I thought you'd be talking about pirates. You do LIKE pirates, don't you? he asked.          They're special beasts, replied Exapno Mapcase, they have a way of finding what's inherently valuable and building an aura around it and making us treasure it all the more. Gallifrey, perched on a chair looking at Exapno Mapcase with undisguised wonder, then she suddenly started, and frowned, as if a dark cloud had passed over her soul.          To make a living from smuggling, as from piracy, one needs to know the territory with a precise and local eye. This must be true whether on land or sea. In regions where particular trade routes run or particular economies have grown up, smuggling activities will develop their own skills, lore and traditions. (Source unknown)          A characteristic of nomads is an absolute vagueness about geography combined with a precise knowledge of orientation. There is a sense in which no beautifully drawn chart can be made to co-incide at any point with the inner maps they carry with them. The two do not relate to each other. Mapping the Next Millenium. Stephen Hall          The writing of a treasure map is the principal creative act of a pirate. It is too dangerous and cumbersome for us to move our treasure across the border lines which wheeze in and out like an accordion. We hide the treasure, often out in the open, dispersed across many layers of space. The thoroughness of the process of reconstruction of the treasure depends upon a pirate's ability to guide a person through a landscape which looks unremarkable to the casual viewer of the treasure map. I am the only pirate currently working whose maps are all words, all riddles, all conundrums and twisted phrases that nonetheless - provide a clear and coherent and accurate path towards the treasure. To the experienced reader these word games are compass points, landmarks and sophisticated navigational markings. The archaic treasure map with x's marking spots and dotted lines connecting others is a sweet and obsolete relic. The topographical treasure map is no longer reliable for it's too easy for a computer to routinely look for pattern recognition and encrypted code is too easily broken, only the relationship between ideas, between abstract thoughts, remains enigmatic to those who intercept the maps. Codes, scale, landmarks, distinguishing features are all things I invent rather than photograph or draw. I make thousands of pages of rough drafts of a single page of a map. The skillful analysis of ideas, subtlety of metaphor and analogy, and the sequencing of phrases is now a mapmaking skill. Ninety three percent of the treasure that I find is eventually recovered.          A transformation occurs when we look at a map, a process that begins with physiology and perception but ends up as knowledge and world view. When we begin to interpret those shapes, associate them with other memories (trips, romances, wars, tragedy) and other forms of knowledge, we move beyond visual perception to something quite different, something requiring imagination. This wonderful moment suggests that invisible elusive border between science and culture, and that transitory movement from the cartography of maps to that more personal and interior cartography, never far off, of one's place in the larger universe, which in fact is the map each one of us constructs and carries and emends in the course of a lifetime, the map in which the overlays of scientific discovery commingle with the obverse meridians, uneven and sporadic though they be, of personal history -what we think and believe, and how we act on the basis of those beliefs. The transition from the ‘possible' to the actual takes place during the act of measurement. Mapping the Next Milleniwn. Stephen Hall         Pirate sites, which carry exotic monikers such as "3 Days Till Death," "Impact of Chaos" and "Field of Dreams" can generally be found only by highly sophisticated computer users who are well schooled in the intricacies of the Internet. L.A. Times. July 12, 1994          The whole hotel shivered with the peals of thunder during an enormous storm. Au had become drenched while hanging out of the window to ring the Happy Hour bell, and his wet hair had stretched and damply dragged down his face, reducing it to nothing more than his grin. He lurched through the lobby delivering phone messages to guests with waterlogged shoes who were drinking dark and fiery Georgian liquor to warm their blood.          Wrapped in acres of cashmere and silk the colour of the storm outside, Winsome sat on the couch with Gallifrey, underneath the portrait of El Ned. So gracious and ethereal that she seemed not flesh but a natural phenomenon, light perhaps, or the pale grey waves of a winter ocean, she summoned stories and anecdotes around books she had read. How like mist is Virginia Woolf’s novel THE WAVES, she said. "The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial" she wrote, and how comforting, don't you think, to be removed from the responsibilities of a linear narrative. Books are always telling more than anybody could ever want to know about another.          While Winsome was speaking Gallifrey's attention had been wandering. She would look at Winsome's calm and peaceful face, and then glance at the front door or turn her head towards the sound of anyone coming or going from the lobby.          I'm sorry, I momentarily lost attention, said Gallifrey.          It doesn't matter at all what people say. All you ever need to know is in someone's eyes, said Winsome, and smiled knowingly, patting Gallifrey's hand.          Fascination is a binding or charm which passes from the mind of the sorcerer through the eyes and to the heart of the one he is bewitching, and sorcery is an instrument of the mind - namely, a pure, shining, subtle vapour proceeding from the purest blood engendered by the heat of the heart, which does continually send rays of a like nature through the eyes. You must know, therefore, that men grow bewitched when they look continuously straight into the eyes of another and that the eyes of the two fasten themselves strongly to one another, and light of eye also to light of eye; mind then joining to mind and carrying flashes to it and fixing them upon it. Picture Museum of Sorcery Magic and Alchemy. Byemile Grillot de Givry. 1929          There's hardware, there's stuff out there in the world and then there's software, laws that control how this stuff behaves. I think this is an important point to make because a hundred years ago reality was invested in the stuff of the world and when you asked what is the world, what is reality, it was all of the atoms, all of the bits and pieces out there in the universe and the laws were just some sort of shadowy underpinning. What has happened in modern physics is that this has been turned on its head and that reality tends to be vested in the laws and the message that I've been giving today is very much that the ultimate reality is grounded in these abstract mathematical laws so that as James Jeans once said, the world starts to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Paul Davies          The late Tim Mutch of NASA, speaking of Voyager 2 as it sailed past Jupiter, remarked: "It was like being in the crows nest of a ship during landfall and passage through an archipelago of strange islands." Modern instruments of measurement have become the "ships" of twentieth century science. So, too, by analogy are scientists our most adventuresome explorers, traversing strange and sometimes dangerous frontiers. Where cartographers of the 16th century sat in their Lisbon studio's patiently debriefing mariners returning from their voyages, weighing the credibility of each report and each measurement, piecing it together into a single, coherent, consistent picture of the geographic world, computers collate inforination from a number of sources before plotting the result in a map. Astronomer / Alan Dressler: Humans project themselves into the worlds around them by some mysterious process of geographic (or spatial) imagination; the map is the launching pad for that act of imagination. The interior merges with the exterior, the personal with the physical, the conscious with the quantitive. Map-readers enter the world of the map, and in that process become changed by it. Maps that emerge from ambitious periods of exploration and discovery have the power to convulse not just scientific theory, but the belief systems of cultures at large. Mapping the Next Millenium. Stephen Hall          Early each evening at The Blues In Orbit Dear Old Jack, the bandleader, would explain his philosophy of music to anyone who happened to be around. The barman and waiters and the kid who trained the beasts that lived in the Wall of Fish never minded for Jack never had his history happen to him the same way twice. Gallifrey sat at the table where the mathematicians usually sat and watched Exapno Mapcase, who was almost as tall as the Wall of Fish, snapping his fingers and watching the fish respond by swimming in flirtatious circles and jumping through a hoop of old forks that had been knotted together.          That Exapno Mapcase, he's the start of it all, he's the one that had the vision, said Dear Old Jack.          But Dear Old Jack, protested Gallifrey. You started this band when you were a boy, several boy's lifetimes before Exapno Mapcase was born.          The thing about vision is that it doesn't know its place in time, said Dear Old Jack.          That's not true, this old Devil tries to blame me for everything, said Exapno Mapcase in a mock angry tone, smiling broadly at Dear Old Jack and towering over the small man who was becoming smaller and more spidery each day as he was growing massively old. As he spoke, Exapno Mapcase absent mindedly patted Gallifrey on the head, her hair tangling and catching in his clan ring.          Magellan ushered in a new age, the explosion known as the Renaissance produced spectacular villians yet the age also boasted courageous pioneers ... Apart from navigation, though, a sea gypsy's knowledge of the ocean is scientific in detail, yet his is far from being a scientists gaze. Mapping the Next Millenium. Stephen Hall          When Dino Bravo turned the comer into Rats Alley at 10.30 p.m. Exapno Mapcase was leaning on the wall outside The Blues In Orbit, looking up at a shadow moving across the window inside the Albatross Suite.          Long lunch today, said Dino Bravo, I've only just escaped. Winsome and Gallifrey are still there, crystallising flowers with Raoul. There are mountains of flowers on the kitchen floor, it looks like they’ll be therefor days. The only problem is that neither Winsome or Raoul can remember whether it's the Cabbage Roses or the Lily of The Valley that is poisonous. It could all end badly.          The shadow wavered and moved to the door and Miss Henrietta, the housemaid, appeared carrying an armload of towels.          Oh, said Exapno Mapcase, and turned on his heel and went back into The Blues In Orbit. FIVE: THE TREASURE ITSELF