The Stone Raft by José Saramago

Newspapers throughout the world, some putting it on the front page beneath a banner headline, published the historic photograph that showed the peninsula, which perhaps we should now definitively call an island, sitting quietly out in the middle of the ocean, maintaining its position with millimetric precision in relation to the cardinal points by which the earth is ruled and guided, with Oporto as far north of Lisbon as ever, Granada as far south of Madrid as it has been since Madrid came into being, and all the rest with the same familiar contours. The journalists concentrated their imaginative powers almost exclusively on divising bold, dramatic headlines, inasmuch as the geological displacement, or rather the tectonic enigma, continued to unfold, as indecipherable now as on the first day.

Fortunately, the pressure of public opinion, for want of a better expression, had diminished, people had stopped asking questions, they were satisfied with the suggestive power of certain striking comparisons, The Birth of a New Atlantis, A Piece Has Moved on the Universal Chessboard, A Link Between America and Europe, An Apple of Discord Between Europe and America, A Battlefield for the Future, but the headline that made the deepest impression was the one in a Portuguese newspaper that read The Need for a New Treaty of Tordesilla, this is truly the simplicity of genius, the author of the idea looked at the map and verified that, give or take a kilometer or two, the peninsula would be situated on the line that in those glorious days had divided the world into two parts, one for me, one for you, one for me.