towers

the choices of master samwise 955
sight blasted by inner lightnings, her mind in agony. Then
turning her maimed head away, she rolled aside and began
to crawl, claw by claw, towards the opening in the dark cliff
behind.
Sam came on. He was reeling like a drunken man, but he
came on. And Shelob cowed at last, shrunken in defeat, jerked
and quivered as she tried to hasten from him. She reached
the hole, and squeezing down, leaving a trail of green-yellow
slime, she slipped in, even as Sam hewed a last stroke at her
dragging legs. Then he fell to the ground.
Shelob was gone; and whether she lay long in her lair,
nursing her malice and her misery, and in slow years of
darkness healed herself from within, rebuilding her clustered
eyes, until with hunger like death she spun once more her
dreadful snares in the glens of the Mountains of Shadow, this
tale does not tell.
Sam was left alone. Wearily, as the evening of the Nameless
Land fell upon the place of battle, he crawled back to his
master.
‘Master, dear master,’ he said, but Frodo did not speak.
As he had run forward, eager, rejoicing to be free, Shelob
with hideous speed had come behind and with one swift
stroke had stung him in the neck. He lay now pale, and heard
no voice, and did not move.
‘Master, dear master!’ said Sam, and through a long silence
waited, listening in vain.
Then as quickly as he could he cut away the binding cords
and laid his head upon Frodo’s breast and to his mouth, but
no stir of life could he find, nor feel the faintest flutter of the
heart. Often he chafed his master’s hands and feet, and
touched his brow, but all were cold.
‘Frodo, Mr. Frodo!’ he called. ‘Don’t leave me here
alone! It’s your Sam calling. Don’t go where I can’t follow!
Wake up, Mr. Frodo! O wake up, Frodo, me dear, me dear.
Wake up!’
* * *