Recently, I was approached by a young explorer who claimed to have come to the restoration due to a trunk he'd found among the effects belonging to an ancestor of his. This trunk contained numerous documents of a possibly D'ni origin.(Other Lara documents are appearing in the DRC forum. This document first appeared in this thread.)According to notes in the trunk, both in English and in Spanish, they belonged to one Domasio Lara, a prospector from Mexico who got lost in a network of caverns in northern New Mexico, south of the San Luis valley. There, he discovered a devastated 'Caverna del Oro', which he assumed was the mythic El Dorado. He gathered up papers, maps and such as proof and returned to the surface. However, he was not believed and passed on his findings to his descendants.
-- from the invitation post by J. D. Barnes
I selected an illuminated map to work on. Unfortunately, I rather overestimated my own technical skills! The map is in very poor condition, and I haven't gotten far with it.
What I have done is to trace the map's features into an illustration program. This does nothing to convey the beauty of the original work, of course, but I'm hoping that it will be of help to other restorers.
The original map is heavily annotated with labels in D'ni. I have not even tried to reproduce this in my version; the lettering is badly worn and my D'ni is terrible at best. I have hopes that another restorer will be able to decipher and translate the labels -- then we'll have some hope of figuring out what's going on in this Age!
(Click for larger image. Or, view it as an SVG document.)
