The road led them through a province that was a block of upland dissected by five rivers; a province where there were fifty words for green and an art of making rugs out of shades of green; a province composed of long lakes between mountains, so that people hardly traveled on roads. They came to a town, and then to the capital.
     It was a splendid city. When it became the capital, it had been amplified with temples and fountains. The road was embraced by it in the form of a fine avenue, crowned with gates and arcades.
     Yet Kunour was restless about staying here, because it was only recently the capital and did not feel like the center of things. The stem of the road was yet to come. So he moved on, to the former capital. In this older city, with its feeling of long composure, he was happy to settle.
     Having become a shoe-wearing building-dweller, he was glad to talk about the frontier road, on which he was expert compared with anyone here. He explained that he had been roadguider and had resigned. He answered road-related questions, though some people didn't appear interested enough to ask the questions they might have.
     The road itself passed through the city, having come from an earlier capital, yet he was not sure of its route. He had to have entered by it, but the city had many streets, at angles to each other, and the line of the road was dislocated and there were a few streets that might have been members of the road or not. There were streets that were greater than the road in their own ways, tall and wide and busy, though one knew that they did not have the soul of the road.
     All this was surprising, because the road, surely, had started off straight — it used to be said at the roadhead about some questionably severe curve that the hills forced, “Just look at what happened to our born-straight road!” But perhaps the straight beginning had been in some plain farther back.
     Arinka said that they might take a walk out the other side and see whether there was a road with the pace-long slabs, and there was.
     Arinka asked whether they should go on, and find the other end of the road.
     “You mean,” said his father, “the place where the road began? There is no such place — the road simply started from the frontier, of the time.” He pictured the road as starting from the tip of some ordinary road.
     The road here, though still honored, had become surprisingly minor. Not much business flowed along it. People here had vehicles of various kinds more powerful than footwheels. There were various kinds of public transport, but it seemed that on streets that were part of the road itself you still had to use footwheels or your feet.
     Kunour had no wish to travel further. There were a few hills ahead, nothing like the mountains he had once built through, but he had reached an age at which hills had grown steeper and longer.
     If his father would not, Arinka, when he was old enough, resolved to go on by himself and find the road's past.