This paper focuses on energy-efficient and fault-tolerant resolution of topographic queries in dense, uniformly deployed, two-dimensional sensor systems. Our approach is based on construction of the topographic map of userdefined features in the network. Once constructed, the map is used to resolve a large number of topographic queries efficiently. We present a distributed algorithm for construction and maintenance of the topographic map in presence of node failures and discuss resolution of topographic queries using the map. Our results show that our algorithm incurs 90% lesser time and 50% lower energy overheads on the average, and recovers more reliably from node failures in the network than the state-of-the-art.