This might have been the end of the road, but it was not. A town lay beside the sea and the road ran past it, between town and beach. People here, as everywhere, felt themselves not to be at an end of the world but at its center.
     As usual Arinka easily found friends. There was a table beside the road at which they sat in conversation. He explained that he was seeking the source of the road, and one of them said: “Here you are beside the sea! Ends are found here, sources are to be found in the mountains.”
     “You are mocking his road,” said another; “it isn't a river. If it flows, it flows upward, its tip is still creeping upward into some mountain, and he is rowing downward against it to find the spring it started from. A spring that is likely to be, or have been, a city. — But it isn't a river and I'm not sure it's a road. What he tells us about it opens up in my mind a world less weary. Here, we are at the dead center. One side of the circle around us is this gulf of the sea, the other is the hinterland, but we know it only too well. We know where all the roads lead to, inland. I wasn't born here, I came at the age of twenty, and I remember that at first it was exciting, I went rambling out in a different direction each weekend, but there isn't an infinity of directions and I came to know them all. Beyond that ridge there is a valley, but it's a dull one. Once, I did go walking up a stream to find its source. It turned out to be not hidden high among forests or rocks but just part-way up a bare corry, surrounded by sheep. If there was ever really a place, presumably at the foot of a mountain, beyond which nothing was known, it would be a shrine.”
     To Arinka the unknown was the road in the direction he was going, and he departed again along it.
     He might have gone on, following the traces of the road that were becoming fainter, hoping to find its beginning and even the reason for its beginning, but, in a small old town called Tiq, he fell in love.