Maps need to be visually coded as such

People only understand verbal indications of space as maps when they’re cued to do so. Navigation must look like navigation, or it won’t work.

Conversely, things that aren’t navigation cannot look like it, or people will be confused, because Maps are more real than experience.

References

Avraamides, Marios N., et al. “Functional Equivalence of Spatial Representations Derived from Vision and Language: Evidence from Allocentric Judgments.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 2004, pp. 801–14.

For verbal information to be encoded as a map, people have to expect (or be asked to) use it as a map (p.811). It’s not encoded that way automatically.