By Zoey Poll

佐伊·波尔(Zoey Poll)

The first three dimensions — length, height, and depth — are included on all topographical maps. The “fourth dimension,” or time, is also available on the website of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo). In the “Journey Through Time,” a timeline displays 175 years of the country’s cartographic history, advancing in increments of 5–10 years. Over the course of two minutes, Switzerland is drawn and redrawn with increasing precision: inky shapes take on hard edges, blues and browns appear after the turn of the century, and in 2016, the letters drop their serifs.

吨他首先三个维度-长度，高度，和深度-被包括在所有的地形图。 瑞士联邦地形局 (Swisstopo)的网站上也提供了“第四维度”或时间。 在“ 穿越时空之旅”中 ，时间线显示了该国175年的制图历史，以5-10年为增量递增。 在两分钟的过程中，瑞士以更高的精确度绘制和重绘：墨色的形状带有坚硬的边缘，世纪之交后出现蓝色和棕色，并且在2016年，字母的衬线掉线了。

Watching a single place evolve over time reveals small histories and granular inconsistencies. Train stations and airports are built, a gunpowder factory disappears for the length of the Cold War. But on certain maps, in Switzerland’s more remote regions, there is also, curiously, a spider, a man’s face, a naked woman, a hiker, a fish, and a marmot. These barely-perceptible apparitions aren’t mistakes, but rather illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo in defiance of their mandate “to reconstitute reality.” Maps published by Swisstopo undergo a rigorous proofreading process, so to find an illicit drawing means that the cartographer has outsmarted his colleagues.

观察一个地方随着时间的推移而变化的过程，可以发现历史悠久，并且存在细微的不一致之处。 建造了火车站和机场，在冷战期间，火药工厂消失了。 但奇怪的是，在某些地图上，在瑞士偏远的地区，也有蜘蛛，一个男人的脸，一个裸体的女人，一个徒步旅行者，一条鱼和一只土拨鼠。 这些几乎无法察觉的幻影并不是错误，而是Swisstopo官方制图师隐藏的插图，无视其“重构现实”的使命。 Swisstopo发布的地图经过严格的校对过程，因此要找到一张非法图纸，则意味着制图师已经超过了他的同事。

It also implies that the mapmaker has openly violated his commitment to accuracy, risking professional repercussions on account of an alpine rodent. No cartographer has been fired over these drawings, but then again, most were only discovered once their author had already left. (Many mapmakers timed the publication of their drawing to coincide with their retirement.) Over half of the known illustrations have been removed. The latest, the marmot drawing, was discovered by Swisstopo in 2016 and is likely to be eliminated from the next official map of Switzerland by next year. As the spokesperson for Swisstopo told me, “Creativity has no place on these maps.”

这也意味着地图制作者公开违反了他对准确性的承诺，由于高山啮齿动物而冒着专业影响的风险。 没有制图者被这些图纸解雇，但是话又说回来，大多数人只有在他们的作者离开后才被发现。 (许多地图制作人员将其图纸的发布时间定为与其退役同时进行。)超过一半的已知插图已被删除。 Swisstopo于2016年发现了最新的土拨鼠图画，并有望在明年的下一张瑞士官方地图中被淘汰。 正如Swisstopo的发言人告诉我的那样：“这些地图上没有创造力。”

Errors — both accidental and deliberate — are not uncommon in maps (17th-century California as an island, the omission of Seattle in a 1960s AAA map). Military censors have long transformed nuclear bunkers into nondescript warehouses and routinely pixelate satellite images of sensitive sites. Many maps also contain intentional errors to trap would-be copyright violators. The work of recording reality is particularly vulnerable to plagiarism: if a cartographer is suspected of copying another’s work, he can simply claim to be duplicating the real world — ideally, the two should be the same. Mapmakers often rely on fictitious streets, typically no longer than a block, to differentiate their accounts of the truth (Oxygen Street in Edinburgh, for example).

错误(偶然和故意)在地图上并不少见(17世纪的加利福尼亚州是一个岛屿 ，在1960年代的AAA地图中省略了西雅图 )。 长期以来，军事检查员已将核掩体转变为不起眼的仓库，并定期对敏感地点的卫星图像进行像素化处理。 许多地图还包含故意错误，以诱使可能成为侵犯版权行为的人。 记录现实的作品尤其容易遭到窃：如果制图师被怀疑抄袭他人的作品，他可以简单地声称是在复制真实世界，理想情况下，两者应该是相同的。 地图制作者通常依靠虚构的街道(通常不超过一个街区)来区分对真相的描述(例如，爱丁堡的氧气街)。

Their entire professional life is spent at the magnification level of a postage stamp.

他们的整个职业生涯都花费在邮票的放大倍数上。

But there is another, less institutional reason to hide something in a map. According to Lorenz Hurni, professor of cartography at ETH Zurich, these illustrations are part inside joke, part coping mechanism. Cartographers are “quite meticulous, really high-precision people,” he says. Their entire professional life is spent at the magnification level of a postage stamp. To sustain this kind of concentration, Hurni suspects that they eventually “look for something to break out of their daily routine.” The satisfaction of these illustrations comes from their transgressive nature — the labor and secrecy required to conceal one of these visual puns.

但是，还有另一个更少的机构理由将某些内容隐藏在地图中。 据苏黎世联邦理工学院制图学教授洛伦兹·赫尔尼(Lorenz Hurni)称，这些插图一部分是玩笑，一部分是应对机制。 他说，制图师是“非常细致，真正高精度的人”。 他们的整个职业生涯都花费在邮票的放大倍数上。 为了维持这种集中注意力，Hurni怀疑他们最终“正在寻找一些突破常规的东西”。 这些插图之所以令人满足，是因为它们具有超越性的本质-隐藏这些视觉双关语之一所需要的劳动和保密性。

And some of them enjoy remarkable longevity. The naked woman drawing, for example, remained hidden for almost sixty years in the municipality of Egg, in northern Switzerland. Her relatively understated shape was composed in 1958 from a swath of green countryside and the blue line of a river, her knees bending at the curve in the stream. She remained unnoticed, reclining peacefully, until 2012.

其中一些人享有长寿。 例如，在瑞士北部埃格(Egg)镇，裸女绘画被隐藏了近六十年。 1958年，她相对低调的形状是由一条绿色的乡村和一条河的蓝线组成的，膝盖弯曲在溪流中。 直到2012年，她一直未被人注意，和平地躺着。

Several of the other drawings came about considerably later. In 1980, a Swisstopo cartographer traced the spider over an arachnid-shaped ice field on the Eiger mountain. It faded out over the course of the decade, retracting its spindly legs in the intermediary editions. Around the same time, another cartographer concealed a freshwater fish in a French nature preserve along the Swiss border. The fish lived in the blue circumference of a marshy lake until 1989 when, according to Swisstopo, “it disappeared from the surface of the lake, diving to the depths.”

其他几个图则在相当晚的时候出现。 1980年，一位Swisstopo制图师在艾格峰(Eiger)上一个蛛网状冰原上追踪了这只蜘蛛。 在过去的十年中，它逐渐淡出，在中间版本中缩回了其弯曲的腿。 大约在同一时间，另一位制图师在瑞士边境沿法国自然保护区隐藏了一条淡水鱼。 这些鱼一直生活在沼泽湖的蓝色外围，直到1989年，据Swisstopo称，“鱼从湖面消失了，潜入深处。”

It’s unclear how these drawings made it past the institute’s proofreaders in the first place. They may have been inserted only after the maps were approved, when cartographers are asked to apply the proofreaders’ final edits. When the maps were once printed as composite layers of different colors, cartographers could have built the drawings from the interplay of different topographical elements (the naked woman, for example, is composed of a blue line over a green-shaded area). Hurni also speculates that cartographers could have partitioned their illustrations over the corners of four separate map sheets, although no such example has (yet) been found.

目前尚不清楚这些图纸是如何首先通过该机构的校对人员的。 当要求制图者应用校对者的最终编辑时，才可能在地图批准后才插入它们。 当地图曾经被印刷为不同颜色的复合层时，制图师本可以通过不同地形元素的相互作用来构建图形(例如，裸体女人由绿色阴影区域上的蓝线组成)。 赫尔尼还推测，制图师本可以在四个单独的地图图的角上划分插图，尽管还没有找到这样的例子。

Some of these clandestine drawings allude to actual topographical features: near the town of Interlaken, where an outcropping of stones approximates two eyes and a nose, the 1980 edition of the map features an angular cartoon face between the trees. (According to local legend, it’s a monk who was turned to stone as punishment for chasing a young girl off the cliff.) In the late 1990s, the same cartographer drew a hiker in the map’s margins. With boots each about the size of a house, the hiker serves a pragmatic purpose. Like a kind of topographic patch, he covers an area in the Italian Alps where the Swiss apparently lacked the necessary “information and data from the Italian geographical services.”

其中一些秘密绘画暗示了实际的地形特征：在因特拉肯(Interlaken)镇附近，那里的石头露头大约有两只眼睛和鼻子，地图的1980年版在树木之间有卡通角。 (根据当地的传说，一位和尚因追赶年轻女孩从悬崖上被判处石刑。)在1990年代后期，同一位制图师在地图的边缘吸引了一位远足者。 徒步旅行者每双靴子的大小都相当于房屋的大小，因此具有务实的目的。 就像一种地形补丁一样，他覆盖了意大利阿尔卑斯山的一个地区，瑞士人显然缺少必要的“来自意大利地理服务的信息和数据”。

The marmot, the latest illustration, hides in plain sight in the Swiss Alps. His plump outline was concealed in the delicate relief shading above a glacier, which shielded him from detection for nearly five years. The mountain’s hachures — short, parallel lines that indicate the angle and orientation of a slope — double as his fur. He is mostly indistinguishable from the surrounding rock, except for his face, tail, and paws. He even fits ecologically: as an animal of the ice age, alpine marmots are comfortable at high altitudes, burrowing into frozen rock for their nine months of hibernation. In 2016, Hurni revealed his location to the public on behalf of an unnamed source.

土拨鼠是最新的插图，藏在瑞士阿尔卑斯山的尽头。 冰川上方微妙的浮雕阴影掩盖了他丰满的轮廓，使他无法被发现将近五年。 这座山峰的丘陵地带-短而平行的线表示斜坡的角度和方向-是他的毛皮的两倍。 除了脸，尾巴和爪子，他与周围的岩石几乎没有区别。 他甚至在生态方面都很合适：作为冰河时代的动物，高山土拨鼠在高海拔地区很舒服，在进入冬眠九个月的冬眠后进入冰冻的岩石。 2016年，Hurni代表未透露姓名的消息人士向公众披露了自己的位置。

There is a degree of winking tolerance for these drawings, which constitute something of an unofficial national tradition: the spokeswoman for Swisstopo referred me to a 1901 fish hidden in a well-known painting of Lake Lucerne at the National Council palace (probably in honor of the palace’s April 1st inauguration, which some European countries celebrate by attaching “April Fish” to the backs of shirts). Nevertheless, the marmot — along with the face and hiker — will likely be “eliminated” from Switzerland’s next official map (per a decision from the chief of cartography).

这些图纸有一定程度的眨眼容忍度，这构成了一种非官方的民族传统：Swisstopo的女发言人将我提到的1901条鱼藏在国民议会宫殿的卢塞恩湖著名画中(可能是为了纪念他)。宫殿的4月1日就职典礼，一些欧洲国家通过在衬衫背面贴上“四月鱼”来庆祝。 尽管如此，土拨鼠，连同面部和远足者，很可能会从瑞士的下一张官方地图上“淘汰”(根据制图主管的决定)。

Swiss cartographers have a longstanding reputation for topographical rigor. A so-called “Seven Years War of Cartography” was even waged in the 1920s over the scale of the national maps, with the Swiss Alpine Club advocating greater topographical detail for its mountaineering members. Swisstopo is now an industry benchmark for the mountains, from its use of aerial photogrammetry (images taken first by balloons and then small planes) to aerial perspective (that natural haziness that renders distant peaks with less contrast). In 1988, they were commissioned to draw Mount Everest.

瑞士制图师在地形严谨方面享有悠久的声誉。 1920年代甚至在国家地图的比例上进行了所谓的“七年制图战争”，瑞士高山俱乐部提倡为其登山成员提供更多的地形细节。 Swisstopo现在是山脉的行业基准，从使用航空摄影测量法(先由气球然后是小飞机拍摄的图像)到空中透视图(自然的模糊度使遥远的山峰对比​​度降低)。 1988年，他们受委托绘制珠穆朗玛峰。

Still, the original drawings were never authorized in the first place. Perhaps a meticulous reading of next year’s Swiss maps may reveal some other nationally-celebrated animals in unfrequented bodies of water or alpine meadows. As Juerg Gilgen, a current cartographer at Swisstopo, told me “as a matter of fact, the proof-reader is also just a human being prone to failure. And cartographers are also just human beings trying to fool around.”

尽管如此，原始图纸始终从未获得过授权。 仔细阅读明年的瑞士地图，也许会发现一些其他不为人知的动物在稀少的水域或高山草甸中繁殖。 正如Swisstopo的现任制图师Juerg Gilgen告诉我的那样：“事实上，校对员也是一个容易失败的人。 制图师也是试图鬼混的人。”