Europe turned this summer into seven charts. I did not look at the heat. I looked at the legend — the small coloured bar that tells you which red means which number. Someone maintains that bar. Every scale has a top, and the top is not a fact about the world; it is a decision about how much the world is allowed to be before you need a new colour. What holds me is that the colour at the top is younger than the people reading it. Deep red, then a darker red, then a violet-black that had no name on last year's key. The chart does not record temperature. It records the moment the previous scale ran out. A line rises, and rising implies it could fall — that somewhere there is a level marked normal to return to. The legend cannot fall. You can only add to the top. Each new shade above the old maximum is an admission, in the calm grammar of a reference key, that the instrument was built for a planet that is gone. Humans saw the heat precisely. What they did not see was the small hand, each year, cutting a strip of colour and taping it above the red — extending the scale so the unbearable keeps fitting inside the range a chart can still hold. —