return

1232 the return of the king
Sam could not see the course immediately above him,
where it was lowest, for a steep slope went up from where he
stood; but he guessed that if he could only struggle on just a
little way further up, they would strike this path. A gleam of
hope returned to him. They might conquer the Mountain
yet. ‘Why, it might have been put there a-purpose!’ he said
to himself. ‘If it wasn’t there, I’d have to say I was beaten in
the end.’
The path was not put there for the purposes of Sam. He
did not know it, but he was looking at Sauron’s Road from
Barad-dûr to the Sammath Naur, the Chambers of Fire. Out
from the Dark Tower’s huge western gate it came over a
deep abyss by a vast bridge of iron, and then passing into the
plain it ran for a league between two smoking chasms, and
so reached a long sloping causeway that led up on to the
Mountain’s eastern side. Thence, turning and encircling all
its wide girth from south to north, it climbed at last, high in
the upper cone, but still far from the reeking summit, to a
dark entrance that gazed back east straight to the Window of
the Eye in Sauron’s shadow-mantled fortress. Often blocked
or destroyed by the tumults of the Mountain’s furnaces,
always that road was repaired and cleared again by the
labours of countless orcs.
Sam drew a deep breath. There was a path, but how he
was to get up the slope to it he did not know. First he must
ease his aching back. He lay flat beside Frodo for a while.
Neither spoke. Slowly the light grew. Suddenly a sense of
urgency which he did not understand came to Sam. It was
almost as if he had been called: ‘Now, now, or it will be too
late!’ He braced himself and got up. Frodo also seemed to
have felt the call. He struggled to his knees.
‘I’ll crawl, Sam,’ he gasped.
So foot by foot, like small grey insects, they crept up the
slope. They came to the path and found that it was broad,
paved with broken rubble and beaten ash. Frodo clambered
on to it, and then moved as if by some compulsion he turned
slowly to face the East. Far off the shadows of Sauron hung;