A Winding Ribbon With A Band Of Gold

They left Keno in the brake doublehobbled with the dog tied to him and rode back into town. They sat on the ground in the dusty square while a thin old man squatted opposite and drew for them with a whittled stick a portrait of the country they said they wished to visit. He sketched in the dust streams and promontories and pueblos and mountain ranges. He commenced to draw trees and houses. Clouds. A bird. He penciled in the horsemen themselves doubled upon their mount. Billy leaned forward from time to time to question the measure of some part of their route whereupon the old man would turn and squint at the horse standing in the street and then give an answer in hours. All the while there sat watching on a bench a few feet away four men dressed in ancient and sunfaded suits. By the time the old man was done the map he'd drawn covered an area in the dirt the size of a blanket. He stood and dusted the seat of his trousers with a swipe of his flattened hand.
Give him a peso, Billy said.
Boyd dug out the pocketbook and unsnapped it and took out the coin and Billy gave it to the old man and the old man took it with grace and dignity and removed his hat and put it on again and they shook hands all around and the old man pocketed the coin and turned and walked out across the little blighted zócalo and disappeared up the street without looking back.

Gillian Welch: I Dream a Highway

When he was gone the men
on the bench began to laugh.
One of them rose to better see the map.
Es un fantasma, he said.
Fantasma?
Sí, sí. Claro.
Cómo?
Cómo? Porque el viejo está loco es como.
Loco?
Billy stood looking at the map.
No es correcto? he said.
The man threw up his hands. He said that what they beheld was but a decoration. He said that anyway it was not so much a question of a correct map but of any map at all. He said that in that country were fires and earthquakes and floods and that one needed to know the country itself and not simply the landmarks therein. Besides, he said, when had that old man last journeyed to those mountains? Or journeyed anywhere at all? His map was after all not really so much a map as a picture of a voyage. And what voyage was that? And when?

Un dibujo de un viaje, he said. Un viaje pasado, un viaje antigun.
He threw up one hand in dismissal. As if no more could be said. Billy looked at the other three men on the bench. They watched with a certain brightness of eye so that he wondered if he were being made a fool of. But the one seated at the right leaned forward and tapped the ash from his cigarette and addressed the man standing and said that as far as that went there were certainly other dangers to a journey than losing one's way. He said that plans were one thing and journeys another. He said it was a mistake to discount the good will inherent in the old man's desire to guide them for it too must be taken into account and would in itself lend strength and resolution to them in their journey.
The man who was standing weighed these words and then erased them in the air before him with a slow fanning motion of his forefinger. He said that the jovenes could hardly be expected to apportion credence in the matter of the map. He said that in any case a bad map was worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside those instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the map in question was a folly and that the dogs in the street would piss upon it. But the man on the right only smiled and said that for that matter the dogs would piss upon their graves as well and how was this an argument?
The man standing said that what argued for one case argued for all and that in any event our graves make no claims outside of their own simple coordinates and no advice as to how to arrive there but only the assurance that arrive we shall. It may even be that those who lie in desecrated graves--by dogs of whatever manner--could have words of a more cautionary nature and better suited to the realities of the world. At this the man at the left who'd so far not spoke at all rose laughing and gestured for the two boys to follow and they went with him out of the square and into the street leaving the disputants to their rustic parkbench tertulia.
--Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing