The mist was all round us; it made a complete silence, and it drifted in the oddest way, making wisps of vapour quite close to our faces. Nor had we any guide except the steepness of the hill. For it is a rule when you are caught in a storm or mist upon the hills, if you are going up, to go the steepest way, and though in such a fog this often took us over a knoll which we had to descend again, yet on the whole it proved a very good rule. It was perhaps the middle of the afternoon, we had been climbing some five hours, we had ascended some six thousand or seven thousand feet, when to our vast astonishment we stumbled upon a sort of road. It must here be explained why we were astonished. The way we had come led nowhere; there were no houses and no men. The Andorrans whom we were about to visit have no communication northward with the outer world except a thin wire leading over the hills, by which those who wish to telephone to them can do so; and of all places in Europe, Andorra is the place out of which men least desire to get and to which men least desire to go. It is like that place beyond Death of which people say that it gives complete satisfaction and from which certainly no one makes any effort to escape, and yet to which no one is very anxious to go. When, therefore, we came to this road, beginning suddenly half way up a bare mountain and appearing unexplained through the mist, we were astonished. It was embanked and entrenched and levelled as would be any great French military road near the frontier fortresses. There was a little runnel running underneath the road, conveying a mountain stream; it was arched with great care, and the arch was made of good hewn stone well smoothed. But when we came right on to this road we found something more astonishing still: we found that it was but the simulacrum or ghost of a road. It was not metalled; it was but the plan or trace or idea of a road. No horses had ever trod its soft earth, no wheels had ever made a rut in it. It had not been used at all. Grass covered it. The explanation of this astonishing sight we did not receive until we had spoken in their own tongue the next day to the imperturbable Andorrans. It was as though a school of engineers had been turned on here for fun, to practise the designing of a road in a place where land was valueless, upon the very summit of the world. We two men, however, reasoned thus (and reasoned rightly as it turned out): “The tall and silent Andorrans in a fit of energy must have begun this road, though later in another fit they abandoned it. Therefore it will lead towards their country.” And as we were very tired of walking up a steep which had now lasted for so many hours, we determined to follow the large zigzags of this unknown and magic half-road, and so we did.