At loose intervals, messengers arrived along the road. They brought rather meaningless messages, at which the roadbuilders nodded and smiled, and sometimes they brought supplies of the foods and medicines that the roadbuilders had not been growing in their moving garden.
     These messengers were strange in some ways and wore clothes on their feet, but the girl found them somewhat more friendly than the roadbuilders, and asked them questions, such as how far it was back to the empire. They said they had traveled for three or four days, and complained that the road was in some places not as smooth as expected.
     The boy, who was now older, enjoyed his duty of designing-ahead, for which he was respected and envied. He didn't need to do it every day, but he went out and meditated on the future landscape before satisfying himself with the next reach. He saw slanting lines up the slopes, exquisitely finding levels or at least reducing steepnesses. He crafted it so that the builders seldom had to cut the land deeper than a spit. He didn't have to join in the work, most of the time.
     The part that he trod was the part the roadbuilders would build next. The parts beyond — he envisaged them but he set no foot on them yet. To do so could be dangerous.
     So, when the slabs had been laid to a certain point and work had broken off, and the next part had not been firmly designed, no foot had yet been set beyond this point, the nose of the road. The road was exploring.

The country ahead was higher, an audience of forests, with some peaks at the back.
     The roadguider kept the road aiming ahead as straight as was reasonably possible. But once, as the country steepened and grew more tangled, he was amazed to find himself emerging on a ledge and looking back down on his companions, laboring on a coil of the road not far below.
     The road at last, after solving forests and gullies, had to tackle a mountain pass. The roadguider could be seen up ahead, on the gravelly screes, thinking about the safe route. Then, slowly, the road came up.
     There came the day when the roadguider started out from only just below the pass's summit, which was a cleft between rocks. He came running back.
     He could hardly speak for amazement, indeed he had hardly seen what he had seen. It was like a sheet of an orangeish color, fading to the sky. By the time the roadbuilders built their way up to the pass and were ready to see beyond it for themselves, they understood that they would simply see more land, a new territory, fading to remoteness.
     Some of them sighed. But the task of building downward was easier in some ways.