Untitled - BoG-Archive

As they walked, Boromir would from time to time glance up with a
worried look. He did not know why he was suddenly uneasy, but the feeling did
not go away. Faramir too began turning his eyes the same direction. By his guess,
Hador and Daeron would likely be at the peak now, or approaching it; their lead
was not so great. And somehow, he too was uneasy.
The feeling still lingered when they reached the top, though for a while
they noticed it less. They had learned to conserve their strength in the deep snow,
and their steady pace took them swiftly upward. And now they were as high up
as they could go without scaling the ice-sheeted cliffs to the uppermost summit.
Faramir called a halt, though there was no need to say it; the view would
have stopped any man in his tracks. They stood side by side looking out to the
south, and it seemed that spread before them was the whole of Gondor. From
that height, nothing of the features of the land could be seen but for the nearer
mountains and hills that seemed so small now. Beyond that there was only an
expanse of green and brown, mottled with blue cloud-shadows, and a far-off
glint of water.
“Do you think… no, that cannot possibly be the sea, can it?” Faramir said
as if to himself. He was utterly entranced. He forgot the cold and the wind and
everything else, and just looked out at this magnificent sight.
“Perhaps a bend in the River?” Boromir answered, shrugging.
After a few moments, Faramir sighed. “It is beautiful. More than I had
dreamed it would be.”
His brother glanced over at him and smiled idly. He agreed, of course.
They were broken out of their reverie by a strange sound. It began softly, as
a deep rumbling in the ground beneath their feet, and in moments it was a roar as
if the mountain was tearing itself apart. From somewhere far off, there came a
sound on the wind of men crying out in terror.
As one, the brothers raced to the far side of the path where it sloped down
again, from whence the sound seemed to come. Some distance to the side and
below, the snow rolled, tumbled, fell as a great swath. At the near edge of the
devastation, perhaps three furloughs away, two small figures could be seen
fleeing, but they moved too slowly. They were overtaken, and disappeared into
the whiteness.
Before the rush of snow even ceased, Boromir and Faramir were running.
The deep snow made the going hard, but somehow they dashed through it
without stumbling, following the path made by the last two men. Their packs
clattered on their backs. They did not stop until they reached the broken, churned
path of the avalanche where the last footsteps stopped.
44