towers

956 the two towers
Then anger surged over him, and he ran about his master’s
body in a rage, stabbing the air, and smiting the stones, and
shouting challenges. Presently he came back, and bending
looked at Frodo’s face, pale beneath him in the dusk. And
suddenly he saw that he was in the picture that was revealed
to him in the mirror of Galadriel in Lórien: Frodo with a pale
face lying fast asleep under a great dark cliff. Or fast asleep
he had thought then. ‘He’s dead!’ he said. ‘Not asleep, dead!’
And as he said it, as if the words had set the venom to its
work again, it seemed to him that the hue of the face grew
livid green.
And then black despair came down on him, and Sam
bowed to the ground, and drew his grey hood over his head,
and night came into his heart, and he knew no more.
When at last the blackness passed, Sam looked up and
shadows were about him; but for how many minutes or hours
the world had gone dragging on he could not tell. He was
still in the same place, and still his master lay beside him
dead. The mountains had not crumbled nor the earth fallen
into ruin.
‘What shall I do, what shall I do?’ he said. ‘Did I come all
this way with him for nothing?’ And then he remembered his
own voice speaking words that at the time he did not understand
himself, at the beginning of their journey: I have something
to do before the end. I must see it through, sir, if you
understand.
‘But what can I do? Not leave Mr. Frodo dead, unburied
on the top of the mountains, and go home? Or go on? Go
on?’ he repeated, and for a moment doubt and fear shook
him. ‘Go on? Is that what I’ve got to do? And leave him?’
Then at last he began to weep; and going to Frodo he
composed his body, and folded his cold hands upon his breast,
and wrapped his cloak about him; and he laid his own sword
at one side, and the staff that Faramir had given at the other.
‘If I’m to go on,’ he said, ‘then I must take your sword, by
your leave, Mr. Frodo, but I’ll put this one to lie by you, as