towers

824 the two towers
dragged along, slower and slower, so that Sam had often to
beg Gollum to wait and not to leave their master behind.
In fact with every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo
felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome.
He was now beginning to feel it as an actual weight
dragging him earthwards. But far more he was troubled by
the Eye: so he called it to himself. It was that more than the
drag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked.
The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that
strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and
earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly
gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the veils
were become that still warded it off. Frodo knew just where
the present habitation and heart of that will now was: as
certainly as a man can tell the direction of the sun with his
eyes shut. He was facing it, and its potency beat upon his
brow.
Gollum probably felt something of the same sort. But what
went on in his wretched heart between the pressure of the
Eye, and the lust of the Ring that was so near, and his grovelling
promise made half in the fear of cold iron, the hobbits
did not guess. Frodo gave no thought to it. Sam’s mind was
occupied mostly with his master, hardly noticing the dark
cloud that had fallen on his own heart. He put Frodo in front
of him now, and kept a watchful eye on every movement of
his, supporting him if he stumbled, and trying to encourage
him with clumsy words.
When day came at last the hobbits were surprised to see
how much closer the ominous mountains had already drawn.
The air was now clearer and colder, and though still far off,
the walls of Mordor were no longer a cloudy menace on the
edge of sight, but as grim black towers they frowned across
a dismal waste. The marshes were at an end, dying away into
dead peats and wide flats of dry cracked mud. The land
ahead rose in long shallow slopes, barren and pitiless, towards
the desert that lay at Sauron’s gate.