towers

790 the two towers
or the imagined step of flapping feet on the rock. But if they
halted and stood still listening, they heard no more, nothing
but the wind sighing over the edges of the stones – yet even
that reminded them of breath softly hissing through sharp
teeth.
All that day the outer ridge of the Emyn Muil had been
bending gradually northward, as they struggled on. Along
its brink there now stretched a wide tumbled flat of scored
and weathered rock, cut every now and again by trench-like
gullies that sloped steeply down to deep notches in the cliffface.
To find a path in these clefts, which were becoming
deeper and more frequent, Frodo and Sam were driven to
their left, well away from the edge, and they did not notice
that for several miles they had been going slowly but steadily
downhill: the cliff-top was sinking towards the level of the
lowlands.
At last they were brought to a halt. The ridge took a sharper
bend northward and was gashed by a deeper ravine. On the
further side it reared up again, many fathoms at a single leap:
a great grey cliff loomed before them, cut sheer down as if
by a knife stroke. They could go no further forwards, and
must turn now either west or east. But west would lead them
only into more labour and delay, back towards the heart of
the hills; east would take them to the outer precipice.
‘There’s nothing for it but to scramble down this gully,
Sam,’ said Frodo. ‘Let’s see what it leads to!’
‘A nasty drop, I’ll bet,’ said Sam.
The cleft was longer and deeper than it seemed. Some way
down they found a few gnarled and stunted trees, the first
they had seen for days: twisted birch for the most part, with
here and there a fir-tree. Many were dead and gaunt, bitten
to the core by the eastern winds. Once in milder days there
must have been a fair thicket in the ravine, but now, after
some fifty yards, the trees came to an end, though old broken
stumps straggled on almost to the cliff ’s brink. The bottom
of the gully, which lay along the edge of a rock-fault, was
rough with broken stone and slanted steeply down. When