The Chambers of Cartography and Revealed Menace. The Chambers of Cartography and Revealed Menace occupy the top of a medium-sized oval-shaped tower in the administrative area of the city of Ex. One hundred floors lie below them. The first four floors of the Chambers proper are filled with an extraordinary library of maps. There are maps of the country as a whole, maps of cities and towns; and maps of places in the middle of nowhere where explorers with a cartographic bent once happened to walk. Objects are also mapped. Two hundred and forty three pieces of paper are dedicated to an intimate map of the outside of a pebble discovered by Professor Yu-tsun Belly in a ditch on the outskirts of the town of Wrinkle. The pebble itself has disappeared, but as the Chambers' mapmakers point out, it is not lost to us. The detail on the papers is so intricate that anyone who studies them finds themselves living through the experience of touching the pebble as if it were in their hands. The absent pebble (as they also point out) now enjoys a kind of double life; and they observe that the map of the pebble is more publicly popular than any common little rock could ever hope to be. The fourth floor of this library is given over to maps of places that have not been found yet. They are divided into categories like 'Undiscovered Countries,' 'The bottom of the ocean,' 'The Sky,' and 'The Sun.' The theory is that a place, once imagined, is bound to exist somewhere. Explorers are sometimes sent out to discover the truth behind the imaginary maps, but only one has ever returned with real proof. The result was not what the mapmakers had hoped for. He proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that one of their oldest and most revered imaginary maps, a gigantic, yellowing slab of musty paper covered in fine penmanship and labelled, "The Land of Eunuch," was in fact a cartographic representation of a puddle made by a murderer's boot as he left the house of his victim in one of the less salubrious parts of Jail. Ever since then, the mapmakers have given each imaginary map three different names to increase their chances of picking the right one. This sometimes means that copies of the same map will be filed separately under several categories. The fifth floor is occupied by the creators of the imaginary maps. They sit on chairs or on the floor, often staring into space, doodling idly or appearing to sleep, but in reality their minds are racing. They possess some of the most supurb creative brains in Ex. One floor above them sit the men and women who make maps of discovered places. They spend their days in an orgy of painstaking measuring and sketching. Everything must be perfect. No hill must lean too much to the left, or aquire an extra cartographic ring and thereby rise too high in relation to its fellows. Two tables are occupied by men whose job it is to color the maps. Above them, a team of letterers ply their erasers over the drawn and coloured maps, rubbing out the roughly pencilled place names and rewriting them with pointed brushes dipped in violet ink. Their room is lit by a large circular skylight decorated with a map of Umbagollah rendered in different shades of coloured glass.