Having said all this, the stranger was silent.

One of my companions whispered to me that the old man must be mad. The
stranger overheard him, and said with a thin smile:

"Oh, I know all about that; several have suggested it already; but it is
no answer, for if I did not come from the End of the World, where did I
come from? No one has seen me hereabouts during the last few days until
I came to this inn. And all the first part of my journey I can very
easily explain, for I have notes of it, and it lasted for years. It is
only this last part which seems to me so difficult.... I tell you I lost
my way, and when a man has lost his way at night he can never find it
again in the daytime."

As he spoke he took a little piece of folded paper, rather dirty, out of
his inner pocket, on which a rough sketch-map was drawn, and he began
touching it with a stump of pencil that he held in his hand. His eyes
seemed to grow dimmer as he did so, and he leaned his head upon his
hand. "I think I have got hold of it, gentlemen," he said.

We did not get up or go too near him, for we thought he might be
dangerous.

"I think, gentlemen," he repeated in a more mumbling and lower and less
certain voice, "I think I have got hold of it. I go backwards again
through the gate to the right, just as then I went to the left, and
after that it cannot be very far, for I see those two rocks in front of
me. Besides which," he muttered less and less coherently, "I ought to
have remembered of course those very high and silent hills with nothing