and made free.  I felt suddenly as though everything I loved had gone from me, irretrievably gone and lost.  I looked round me, and I could discern through a mist the bases of some black and sinister rocks, that towered up intolerably above me; in between them were channels full of stones and drifted snow.  Anything more stupendous than those black-ribbed crags, those toppling precipices, I had never seen.  The wind howled among them, and sometimes there was a noise of rocks cast down.  I knew in some obscure way that my path lay there, and my heart absolutely failed me.  Instead of going straight to the rocks, I began to creep along the base to see whether I could find some easier track.  Suddenly the voice of Amroth said, rather sharply, in my ear, “Don’t be silly!” This homely direction, so peremptorily made, had an instantaneous effect.  If he had said, “Be not faithless,” or anything in the copybook manner, I should have sat down and resigned myself to solemn despair.  But now I felt a fool and a coward as well.

So I addressed myself, like a dog who hears the crack of a whip, to the rocks.

It would be tedious to relate how I clambered and stumbled and agonised.  There did not seem to me the slightest use in making the attempt, or the smallest hope of reaching the top, or the least expectation of finding anything worth finding.  I hated everything I had ever seen or known; recollections of old lives and of the quiet garden I had left came upon me with a sort of mental nausea.  This was very different from the amiable and easy-going treatment I had expected.  Yet I did struggle on, with a hideous faintness and weariness—­but would it never stop?  It seemed like years to me, my hands frozen and wetted by snow and dripping water, my feet bruised and wounded by sharp stones, my garments strangely torn and rent, with stains of blood showing through in places.  Still the hideous business continued, but progress was never quite impossible.  At one place I found the rocks wholly impassable, and choosing the broader of two ledges which ran left and right, I worked out along the cliff, only to find that the ledge ran into the precipices, and I had to retrace my steps, if the shuffling motions I made could be so called.  Then I took the harder of the two, which zigzagged backwards and forwards across the rocks.  At one place I saw a thing which moved me very strangely.  This was a heap of bones, green, slimy, and ill-smelling, with some tattered rags of cloth about them, which lay in a heap beneath a precipice.  The thought that a man could fall and be killed in such a place moved me with a fresh misery.  What that meant I could not tell.  Were we not away from such things as mouldering flesh and broken bones?  It seemed not; and I climbed madly away from them.  Quite suddenly I came to the top, a bleak platform of rock, where I fell prostrate on my face and groaned.

“Yes, that was an ugly business,” said the voice of Amroth beside me, “but you got through it fairly well.  How do you feel?”