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.Helps nice master.But that's no matter.Theair's moving, change is coming.Smjagol wonders; he's not happy.'He went on again, but his uneasiness grew, and every now and again hestood up to his full height, craning his neck eastward and southward.Forsome time the hobbits could not hear or feel what was troubling him.Thensuddenly all three halted, stiffening and listening.To Frodo and Sam itseemed that they heard, far away, a long wailing cry, high and thin andcruel.They shivered.At the same moment the stirring of the air becameperceptible to them; and it grew very cold.As they stood straining theirears, they heard a noise like a wind coming in the distance.The mistylights wavered, dimmed, and went out.Gollum would not move.He stood shaking and gibbering to himself, untilwith a rush the wind came upon them, hissing and snarling over the marshes.The night became less dark, light enough for them to see, or half see,shapeless drifts of fog, curling and twisting as it rolled over them andpassed them.Looking up they saw the clouds breaking and shredding; and thenhigh in the south the moon glimmered out, riding in the flying wrack.For a moment the sight of it gladdened the hearts of the hobbits; butGollum cowered down, muttering curses on the White Face.Then Frodo andSamstaring at the sky, breathing deeply of the fresher air, saw it come: asmall cloud flying from the accursed hills; a black shadow loosed fromMordor; a vast shape winged and ominous.It scudded across the moon, andwith a deadly cry went away westward, outrunning the wind in its fell speed.They fell forward, grovelling heedlessly on the cold earth.But theshadow of horror wheeled and returned, passing lower now, right above them,sweeping the fen-reek with its ghastly wings.And then it was gone, flyingback to Mordor with the speed of the wrath of Sauron; and behind it the windroared away, leaving the Dead Marshes bare and bleak.The naked waste, asfar as the eye could pierce, even to the distant menace of the mountains,was dappled with the fitful moonlight.Frodo and Sam got up, rubbing their eyes, like children wakened from anevil dream to find the familiar night still over the world.But Gollum layon the ground as if he had been stunned.They roused him with difficulty,and for some time he would not lift his face, but knelt forward on hiselbows, covering the back of his head with his large flat hands.`Wraiths!' he wailed.`Wraiths on wings! The Precious is their master. They see everything, everything.Nothing can hide from them.Curse the WhiteFace! And they tell Him everything.He sees, He knows.Ach, gollum, gollum,gollum! ' It was not until the moon had sunk, westering far beyond TolBrandir, that he would get up or make a move.From that time on Sam thought that he sensed a change in Gollum again.He was more fawning and would-be friendly; but Sam surprised some strangelooks in his eyes at times, especially towards Frodo; and he went back moreand more into his old manner of speaking.And Sam had another growinganxiety.Frodo seemed to be weary, weary to the point of exhaustion.He saidnothing.indeed he hardly spoke at all; and he did not complain, but hewalked like one who carries a load, the weight of which is ever increasing;and he dragged along, slower and slower, so that Sam had often to beg Gollumto wait and not to leave their master behind.In fact with every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ringon its chain about his neck grow more burdensome.He was now beginning tofeel it as an actual weight dragging him earthwards.But far more he wastroubled by the Eye: so he called it to himself.It was that more than thedrag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked.The Eye: thathorrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power topierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pinyou under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable.So thin, so frail and thin, theveils were become that still warded it off.Frodo knew just where thepresent habitation and heart of that will now was: as certainly as a man cantell the direction of the sun with his eyes shut.He was facing it, and itspotency beat upon his brow.Gollum probably felt something of the same sort.But what went on inhis wretched heart between the pressure of the Eye, and the lust of the Ringthat was so near, and his grovelling promise made half in the fear of coldiron, the hobbits did not guess: Frodo gave no thought to it.Sam's mind wasoccupied mostly with his master hardly noticing the dark cloud that hadfallen on his own heart.He put Frodo in front of him now, and kept awatchful eye on every movement of his, supporting him if he stumbled, andtrying to encourage him with clumsy words.When day came at last the hobbits were surprised to see how much closerthe ominous mountains had already drawn.The air was now clearer and colder,and though still far off, the walls of Mordor were no longer a cloudy menaceon the edge of sight, but as grim black towers they frowned across a dismal waste.The marshes were at an end, dying away into dead peats and wide flatsof dry cracked mud.The land ahead rose in long shallow slopes, barren andpitiless, towards the desert that lay at Sauron's gate.While the grey light lasted, they cowered under a black stone likeworms, shrinking, lest the winged terror should pass and spy them with itscruel eyes.The remainder of that journey was a shadow of growing fear inwhich memory could find nothing to rest upon.For two more nights theystruggled on through the weary pathless land.The air, as it seemed to them,grew harsh, and filled with a bitter reek that caught their breath andparched their mouths.At last, on the fifth morning since they took the road with Gollum,they halted once more.Before them dark in the dawn the great mountainsreached up to roofs of smoke and cloud.Out from their feet were flung hugebuttresses and broken hills that were now at the nearest scarce a dozenmiles away.Frodo looked round in horror.Dreadful as the Dead Marshes hadbeen, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loathsome far was thecountry that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes.Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green springwouldcome; but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again.Herenothinglived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness.The gaspingpools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as ifthe mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about.High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blastedand poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowlyrevealed in the reluctant light.They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lastingmonument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all theirpurposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing --unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion.`I feelsick,' said Sam.Frodo did not speak
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