The General said nothing about the coastline not matching the charts. Just kept us on course, like he already knew it would be there. First light and I'm standing in citrus crushed underfoot, figs still hanging past when they should have dropped, smoke somewhere in the canopy with no fire under it that any of us could find, and the timber — I have smelled a hundred kinds of wood on this voyage, and none like that, warm like it remembered something. He told us this place would not go on any chart. Not asked. Told. Every sketch we made ashore was handed over, and I never saw them again. Last thing he wrote, and I only saw it because I carried the log after him: not every discovery is meant to survive the map. I think about that line more than I think about the coast itself.
