This article contemplates the meaning of a word, site, which Segalen inscribes in the plural at the beginning of a file opened in 1917 and left unfinished. Marked with a strong subjective imprint, this word gathers some of the great orientations of the geographic imagination. It suggests a recognition based upon a theory of contemplation and a taming which reveals the uncertain nature of the object, always a tributary of the void, of the absence and of the ghosts which haunt it. It is only when it is translated on the very surface of the body through a written (or designed) track that the site comes into full existence.