return

1076 the return of the king
At first men laughed and did not greatly fear such devices.
For the main wall of the City was of great height and marvellous
thickness, built ere the power and craft of Númenor
waned in exile; and its outward face was like to the Tower of
Orthanc, hard and dark and smooth, unconquerable by steel
or fire, unbreakable except by some convulsion that would
rend the very earth on which it stood.
‘Nay,’ they said, ‘not if the Nameless One himself should
come, not even he could enter here while we yet live.’ But
some answered: ‘While we yet live? How long? He has a
weapon that has brought low many strong places since the
world began. Hunger. The roads are cut. Rohan will not
come.’
But the engines did not waste shot upon the indomitable
wall. It was no brigand or orc-chieftain that ordered the
assault upon the Lord of Mordor’s greatest foe. A power and
mind of malice guided it. As soon as the great catapults were
set, with many yells and the creaking of rope and winch, they
began to throw missiles marvellously high, so that they passed
right above the battlement and fell thudding within the first
circle of the City; and many of them by some secret art burst
into flame as they came toppling down.
Soon there was great peril of fire behind the wall, and all
who could be spared were busy quelling the flames that
sprang up in many places. Then among the greater casts
there fell another hail, less ruinous but more horrible. All
about the streets and lanes behind the Gate it tumbled down,
small round shot that did not burn. But when men ran to
learn what it might be, they cried aloud or wept. For the
enemy was flinging into the City all the heads of those who
had fallen fighting at Osgiliath, or on the Rammas, or in the
fields. They were grim to look on; for though some were
crushed and shapeless, and some had been cruelly hewn, yet
many had features that could be told, and it seemed that they
had died in pain; and all were branded with the foul token of
the Lidless Eye. But marred and dishonoured as they were,
it often chanced that thus a man would see again the face of