The provinces continued, differing from each other in their own ways, all with many people, some with more forests or fields or factories than others. They spoke dialects that diverged from each other and from the correct language of the empire. Some of them seemed hardly to know that they were parts of the empire. They could almost have been Frantagont.
     Roads were of diverging natures from that of the road. They had hedges; or walls; turned corners.
     The road had increasing portions that were not well maintained. Stretches had been sidelined by other roads. Arinka was sometimes uncertain that he was still on the road, but he was able to observe, with a little digging, that this road and this road only included the pace slabs. It might have been repaired with other materials, but the slabs could be found as usual, or even more than usual and perhaps thicker than usual — some to the pace length and cubit width and more of them reduced by imperfections, as was usual. He had abandoned his footwheels some time back, had to jettison the wheels from his kit too and carry it on his back.
     He came to an even older capital, and broke his journey in other towns, sometimes long enough that it might have seemed he had been diverted into a settled profession, such as carpenter or singer, but this was only for a while. He was tempted to relent this journeying and go back to his father, or all the way to his mother and his sister — he was as if at the end of an ever longer string, dropping down a well of distance; but he went on. There was another town that claimed to have been once the capital, and then another sea.