WHEN it was nearly noon my companion said to me: “By what sign or track do you propose to cross the mountains?” For the mountains here seem higher than any of highest clouds: the valley beneath them is broad and full of fields: beyond, a long day off, stands in a huge white wall the Sierra del Cadi. Yet we must cross these hills if ever we were to see the secluded and little-known Andorrans. For the Andorrans live in a sort of cup fenced in on every side by the Pyrenees; it was on this account that my companion asked me how I would cross over to their land and by what sign I should find my way.
When I had thought a little I answered:
“By none. I propose to go right up at them, and over unless I find some accident by which I am debarred.”
“Why, then,” said he, “let us strike up at once, walking steeply until we come into a new country.”
This advice was good, and so, though we had no longer any path, and though a mist fell upon us, we began walking upwards, and it was like going up a moor in the West Riding, except that it went on[195] and on and on, hour after hour, and was so steep that now and then one had to use one’s hands.
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[196] 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[197] to follow the large zigzags of this unknown and magic half-road, and so we did.
It was the oddest sensation in the world walking in the mist a mile and more above the habitations of men, upon unmetalled, common earth which yet had the exact shape of pavements, cuttings, and embankments upon either side, with no sort of clue as to where it led or as to why men began to make it, and still less of an argument as to why they had ceased.
It went up and up in great long turns and z’s upon the face of the mountain, until at last it grew less steep; the mist grew colder, and after a long flat I thought the ............