A Rough Map of Ex. I = The Tower of Interosseus (The council tower) U = The University of Ex. F = The Tower of Foot. T = The Theatre District. A = The Aristocratic District. The dark green line surrounding Ex describes the the city's hedge maze. 'v' indicates a gap in the hedge maze through which people can enter the city. The River Fly appears to the west, while the Bay of Ex lies on the city's northern border. (From a conversation with Llewellyn Crumb-Cushion, head of the Chambers of Cartography and Revealed Menace in Ex.) "It's a standing joke with the Exian cartographers that the only place they can't make a map of is Ex. One of the young ones summed it up for me very well, he said, "The better you know a place, the harder it is to describe it," and I think that's very true. You've also got to take into account the amount of detail in this city. Those narrow streets are very hard to map. I know people who'll swear that the streets disappear after you've drawn them, I remember one of us, Theresa, coming in after she'd mapped a section and then gone out to look at the real thing and compare them: "It's gone Llewellyn," she told me, "It was there when I was scouting it yesterday and today it's gone," I said, "Are you sure it was the same area," and she said, "Exactly the same, the shape of the sky between the towers was the same, the same man was selling leaves and flowers on the corner was the same, the ivy had the same hole in it where the insects had gone through, only the street had turned into a wall." We lost one of our best cartographers - I think he was our very best cartographer, actually: certainly the most dedicated man we've had here for a long time - because the city started talking to him. Alan was one of those people who like everything to be neat and boxed and understandable, if you know what I mean. He spent nine years trying to turn this city into an accurate map, but at the end of year eight he started telling us that Sarah* wanted him to stop defining her, she didn't like it, and then one day he day he walks in and says, Right, That's it, she's mad at me this time, I have to get away - and off he goes to Gum Gooloo. We were shocked. I mean, this was a man who devoted his life to his city, but in the end he was just spooked by it. We've still got his map. It's one of the most beautiful things I've seen in my life, but as far as maps go it's useless. We keep showing it to people, and they say "It's a tapestry," or "It's a drawing of a wasp's wing," or "It's a heap of coloured cobwebs" - but nobody ever recognises it as Ex. That's why I've been telling the cartographers since then to be as broad as they can. "Make it feel like Ex, and don't worry about following the streets exactly," I say to them. "After all, nobody gets around this city by following street names. We know where we're going because it feels right. That's what we need for Ex: a map with a feel." " *Sarah Featherstone, the city's founder. See The Founding of Ex for more information.