The purpose of each of them is self-evident. Every rod of it is for use and to meet some requirement that presents itself. They are bordered, wherever they extend, with beautiful homes, monuments and temples, commemorative of some great achievement in civilization and progress.
The residential grounds, farms and gardens are marvels of exquisite taste without an exception, so far as I was able to note, modeled after countless designs, which give the earth's surface a versatility of beauty that is enchanting.
There are farms and gardens everywhere except in a limited number of the compact squares of cities, small and perfectly kept, and productive in a sense and to a degree absolutely incredible to the dwellers of any other land.
As to these roadways: They are of the uniform width of two hundred feet wherever you find them, whether skirting sea, lake or river, penetrating valleys or clambering around and around the ascent of the mountains from base to apex, where some monument or temple, or both, are perched, overlooking hundreds of square miles.
As already stated, they are everywhere as smooth and kept as clean as a tiled floor, with a sense or quality of elasticity, and seemingly indestructible. I would have regarded them as natural phenomena had I not seen a mountain being terraced and a roadway being graded and finished without any of the paraphernalia of our own methods of engineering and construction.
Earth and rock seemed to melt and become mobile under the influence of some unseen power, and gangs of men, following with levelers of light machinery, modulated the grades and contours of the crumbled rock and soil. Others followed these, compounding, expanding and laying down a plastic and rapidly hardening envelope, thus finishing the surface like the roads over which we were gliding, some of which, I was told, had been in use for many centuries without the slightest change of condition.
I expressed a doubt as to their longevity.
Karmas smiled and said:
"You judge by experience. In your cities you import material from some distant country or island, and by mechanical manipulation and chemical combination and processes fit it to be laid down as a pavement. When finished it looks almost as smooth and beautiful as yonder landway being newly constructed to accommodate the expanding population of the district. But the resemblance ends here.