Compass rose and world map on both feet

The old trade-route map was worse. Its coastlines had been copied from a ship's log soaked in seawater, so Africa lifted off the paper in a grey bloom and Australia had faded to the colour of weak tea. I spent three nights with a stipple brush, dotting shadow into the rose so the points stood up from the sheet as if they meant it. On the fourth morning Oduya came down the stairs in his shirtsleeves and held the proof to the window for a long time.

'You've put the south at the bottom,' he said. 'Obviously,' I said. He tapped the S with one finger. 'Sailors once read a chart from where they had come, not where they were going. Turn it round and tell me what you see.' I turned it round. The continents swung into a shape I had never noticed, and the smudged north-east point now aimed straight at the window where I was standing.

I kept the ruling pen and gave the brass compass to Oduya, who said it had been wrong for forty years and he had known it all along. We never agreed which way was up. The plates went to press that autumn with the rose exactly as I drew it, and I still think the printer's smudge was the only honest line on any of them.