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the land of shadow 1203
so sure. And he was right there too. Things are looking up,
Mr. Frodo. Haven’t you got some hope now?’
‘Well no, not much, Sam,’ Frodo sighed. ‘That’s away
beyond the mountains. We’re going east not west. And I’m
so tired. And the Ring is so heavy, Sam. And I begin to see
it in my mind all the time, like a great wheel of fire.’
Sam’s quick spirits sank again at once. He looked at his
master anxiously, and he took his hand. ‘Come, Mr. Frodo!’
he said. ‘I’ve got one thing I wanted: a bit of light. Enough
to help us, and yet I guess it’s dangerous too. Try a bit
further, and then we’ll lie close and have a rest. But take a
morsel to eat now, a bit of the Elves’ food; it may hearten
you.’
Sharing a wafer of lembas, and munching it as best they
could with their parched mouths, Frodo and Sam plodded
on. The light, though no more than a grey dusk, was now
enough for them to see that they were deep in the valley
between the mountains. It sloped up gently northward, and
at its bottom went the bed of a now dry and withered stream.
Beyond its stony course they saw a beaten path that wound
its way under the feet of the westward cliffs. Had they known,
they could have reached it quicker, for it was a track that left
the main Morgul-road at the western bridge-end and went
down by a long stair cut in the rock to the valley’s bottom. It
was used by patrols or by messengers going swiftly to lesser
posts and strongholds north-away, between Cirith Ungol and
the narrows of Isenmouthe, the iron jaws of Carach Angren.
It was perilous for the hobbits to use such a path, but they
needed speed, and Frodo felt that he could not face the toil
of scrambling among the boulders or in the trackless glens of
the Morgai. And he judged that northward was, maybe, the
way that their hunters would least expect them to take. The
road east to the plain, or the pass back westward, those they
would first search most thoroughly. Only when he was well
north of the Tower did he mean to turn and seek for some
way to take him east, east on the last desperate stage of his