towers

804 the two towers
you. But you must help us, if you can. One good turn
deserves another.’
‘Yess, yes indeed,’ said Gollum sitting up. ‘Nice hobbits!
We will come with them. Find them safe paths in the dark,
yes we will. And where are they going in these cold hard
lands, we wonders, yes we wonders?’ He looked up at them,
and a faint light of cunning and eagerness flickered for a
second in his pale blinking eyes.
Sam scowled at him, and sucked his teeth; but he seemed
to sense that there was something odd about his master’s
mood and that the matter was beyond argument. All the same
he was amazed at Frodo’s reply.
Frodo looked straight into Gollum’s eyes which flinched
and twisted away. ‘You know that, or you guess well enough,
Sméagol,’ he said, quietly and sternly. ‘We are going to
Mordor, of course. And you know the way there, I believe.’
‘Ach! sss!’ said Gollum, covering his ears with his hands,
as if such frankness, and the open speaking of the names,
hurt him. ‘We guessed, yes we guessed,’ he whispered; ‘and
we didn’t want them to go, did we? No, precious, not the
nice hobbits. Ashes, ashes, and dust, and thirst there is; and
pits, pits, pits, and Orcs, thousands of Orcses. Nice hobbits
mustn’t go to – sss – those places.’
‘So you have been there?’ Frodo insisted. ‘And you’re
being drawn back there, aren’t you?’
‘Yess. Yess. No!’ shrieked Gollum. ‘Once, by accident it
was, wasn’t it, precious? Yes, by accident. But we won’t
go back, no, no!’ Then suddenly his voice and language
changed, and he sobbed in his throat, and spoke but not to
them. ‘Leave me alone, gollum! You hurt me. O my poor
hands, gollum! I, we, I don’t want to come back. I can’t find
it. I am tired. I, we can’t find it, gollum, gollum, no, nowhere.
They’re always awake. Dwarves, Men, and Elves, terrible
Elves with bright eyes. I can’t find it. Ach!’ He got up and
clenched his long hand into a bony fleshless knot, shaking it
towards the East. ‘We won’t!’ he cried. ‘Not for you.’ Then
he collapsed again. ‘Gollum, gollum,’ he whimpered with his