And yet the line was there, drawn on all the maps. Or rather, it was the upper edge of all the maps, with nothing shown beyond it. Since people—at least, before Google Earth came along—could not actually hover miles above the ground and see the world as birds and gods did, they had to make do with maps, which substituted for actually seeing things; and, in that way, the imaginary figments of surveyors and the conventions of cartographers could become every bit as real as rocks and rivers. Perhaps even more so, since you could look at the map any time you wanted, whereas going to look at the physical border involved a lot of effort. So perhaps it might as well be the end of the world, as far as some of the locals were concerned, and might affect the way they thought accordingly.