Frodo looked around in horror.

The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and gray, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.

The had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing --unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion.

'I feel sick,' said Sam. Frodo said nothing.

The stood there like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know that they can only come to morning through the shadows. The light broadened and hardened. The gasping pits and poisoned mounds grew hideously clear. The sun was up, walking among the clouds and long flags of smoke, but even the sunlight was defiled. The hobbits had no welcome for the light; unfriendly it seemed, revealing them in their helplessness-- little squeaking ghosts that wandered among the
ash-heaps of the Dark Lord.

Too weary to go further they sought for some place where they could rest. For a while they sat without speaking under the shadow of a mound of slag; but foul fumes leaking out of it, catching their throats and choking them. Gollum was the first to get up. Sputtering and cursing he rose, and with out a word or a glance at the hobbits he crawled away on all fours. Frodo and sam crawled after him, until they came to a wide circular pit, high banked upon the west. It was cold and dead, and a foul sump of oily many-coloured ooze lay at it's bottom. In this evil hole they cowered, hoping to in it's shadow to escape the attention of the Eye.

Suddenly Sam woke up thinking he had heard his master calling. It was evening. Frodo could not have called, for he had fallen asleep, and had slid down nearly to the bottom of the pit. Gollum was by him. For a moment Sam thought Gollum was trying to rouse Frodo; then he saw that it was not so. Gollum was talking to himself. Smeagol was holding a debate with some other thought that used the same voice but made it squeak and his. A place light and a green light alternated in his eyes as he spoke.

'Smeagol promised,' said the first thought.

'Yes, yes my precious,' came the answer, 'we promised; to save our precious, not to let Him have it... never. But it's going to Him, yes, nearer every step."

'Yes! We wants it! We wants it!'

In the falling dusk they scrammbled out of the pit and slowly threaded their way through the dead land. They had not gone far before they felt once more the fear that had fallen on them when the winged shape swept over the marshes. They halted, cowering on the evil-smelling ground; but they saw nothing in the gloomy evening sky above, and soon the menance passed, high overhead, going maybe on some swift errand from Barad-dur. After a while Gollum got up and crept forward again, muttering and shaking.

About an hour after midnight the fear fell on them a third time, but now it seemed more remote, as if it were passing far above the clouds, rushing with terrible speed into the West.

So they stumbled on through the weary end of the night, and until the coming of another day of fear they wakjed in silence with bowed heads, seeing nothing, and hearing nothing but the wind hissing in their ears.