From above, it looks like a railway yard. Dozens of tracks, crossing and curving through solid rock. But there are no rails here. No trains. No station. This is Malta, and these tracks come from a world thousands of years before trains. Some climb ridges. Some plunge off cliffs. Some run into the sea.
And nobody knows why.
Across four continents, there are roads that go where no road should. A path one plank wide, chiseled into a Chinese mountainside by a monk who planned to become immortal. A highway of buried water jars, 250 miles long, aimed at a kingdom no map has ever shown. A paved track that let warships sail across dry land. And a road wider than a modern highway, found by NASA beneath nine centuries of sand that ends at the edge of a canyon.
These are the five most mysterious ancient roads. Every one of them still leads somewhere.
No one agrees where…
