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the land of shadow 1207
and sliding stones. There the last living things gave up their
struggle; the tops of the Morgai were grassless, bare, jagged,
barren as a slate.
After much wandering and search they found a way that
they could climb, and with a last hundred feet of clawing
scramble they were up. They came to a cleft between two
dark crags, and passing through found themselves on the
very edge of the last fence of Mordor. Below them, at the
bottom of a fall of some fifteen hundred feet, lay the inner
plain stretching away into a formless gloom beyond their
sight. The wind of the world blew now from the West, and
the great clouds were lifted high, floating away eastward; but
still only a grey light came to the dreary fields of Gorgoroth.
There smokes trailed on the ground and lurked in hollows,
and fumes leaked from fissures in the earth.
Still far away, forty miles at least, they saw Mount Doom,
its feet founded in ashen ruin, its huge cone rising to a great
height, where its reeking head was swathed in cloud. Its fires
were now dimmed, and it stood in smouldering slumber, as
threatening and dangerous as a sleeping beast. Behind it there
hung a vast shadow, ominous as a thunder-cloud, the veils
of Barad-dûr that was reared far away upon a long spur
of the Ashen Mountains thrust down from the North. The
Dark Power was deep in thought, and the Eye turned inward,
pondering tidings of doubt and danger: a bright sword, and
a stern and kingly face it saw, and for a while it gave little
thought to other things; and all its great stronghold, gate
on gate, and tower on tower, was wrapped in a brooding
gloom.
Frodo and Sam gazed out in mingled loathing and wonder
on this hateful land. Between them and the smoking mountain,
and about it north and south, all seemed ruinous and
dead, a desert burned and choked. They wondered how the
Lord of this realm maintained and fed his slaves and his
armies. Yet armies he had. As far as their eyes could reach,
along the skirts of the Morgai and away southward, there
were camps, some of tents, some ordered like small towns.