J.R.R. Tolkien The Unfinished Tales Of M

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wide. Well, M�m, I will come and see what you have to show. How long will it
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take us, stumbling Men, to come thither?" "All this day until dusk," M�m
answered.
The company set westward, and T�rin went at the head with M�m at his side.
They walked warily when they left the woods, but all the land was empty and
quiet. They passed over the tumbled stones, and began to climb; for Amon R�dh
stood upon the eastern edge of the high moorlands that rose between the vales
of Sirion and Narog, and even above the stony heath at its base its crown was
reared up a thousand feet and more. Upon the eastern side a broken land
climbed slowly up to the high ridges among knots of birch and rowan, and
ancient thorn-trees rooted in rock. About the lower slopes of Amon R�dh there
grew thickets of aeglos
; but its steep grey head was bare, save for the red seregon that mantled the
stone.
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As the afternoon was waning the outlaws drew near to the roots of the hill.
They came now from the north, for so M�m had led them, and the light of the
westering sun fell upon the crown of Amon R�dh, and the seregon was all in
flower.
"See! There is blood on the hill-top," said Andróg.
"Not yet," said T�rin.
* * *
The sun was sinking and the light was failing in the hollows. The hill now
loomed up before them and above them, and they wondered what need there could
be of a guide to so plain a mark. But as M�m led them on, and they began to
climb the last steep slopes, they perceived that he was following some path by
secret signs or old custom. Now his course wound to and fro, and if they
looked aside they saw that at either hand dark dells and chines opened, or the
land ran down into wastes of great stones, with falls and holes masked by
bramble and thorn. There without a guide they might have laboured and
clambered for days to find a way.
At length they came to steeper but smoother ground. They passed under the
shadows of ancient rowan-trees into aisles of long-legged aeglos:
a gloom filled with a sweet scent. Then suddenly there was a
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rock-wall before them, flat-faced and sheer, towering high above them in the
dusk.
"Is this the door of your house?" said T�rin. "Dwarves love stone, it is
said." He drew close to M�m, lest he should play them some trick at the last.
"Not the door of the house, but the gate of the garth," said M�m. Then he
turned to the right along the cliff-foot, and after twenty paces halted
suddenly; and T�rin saw that by the work of hands or of weather there was a
cleft so shaped that two faces of the wall overlapped, and an opening ran back
to the left between them. Its entrance was shrouded by long-trailing plants
rooted in crevices above, but within there was a steep stony path going
upwards in the dark. Water trickled down it, and it was dank. One by one they
filed up. At the top the path turned right and south again, and brought them
through a thicket of thorns out upon a green flat, through which it ran on
into the shadows. They had come to M�m's house, Bar-en-Nibin-noeg, which
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only ancient tales in Doriath and Nargothrond remembered, and no Men had seen.
But night was falling, and the east was starlit, and they could not yet see
how this strange place was shaped.
Amon R�dh had a crown: a great mass like a steep cap of stone with a bare
flattened top. Upon its north side there stood out from it a shelf, level and
almost square, which could not be seen from below; for behind it stood the
hill-crown like a wall, and west and east from its brink sheer cliffs fell.
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Only from the north, as they had come, could it be reached with ease by those
who knew the way. From the cleft a path
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led, and passed soon into a little grove of dwarfed birches growing about a
clear pool in a rock-hewn basin.
This pool was fed by a spring at the foot of the wall behind, and through a
runnel it spilled like a white thread over the western brink of the shelf.
Behind the screen of the trees near the spring, between two tall buttresses of
rock there was a cave. No more than a shallow grot it looked, with a low
broken arch; but further in it had been deepened and bored far under the hill
by the slow hands of the Petty-dwarves, in the long years that they had dwelt
there, untroubled by the Grey-elves of the woods.
Through the deep dusk M�m led them past the pool, where now the faint stars
were mirrored among the shadows of the birch-boughs. At the mouth of the cave
he turned and bowed to T�rin. "Enter," he said, "Bar-en-Danwedh, the House of
Ransom; for so it shall be called."
"That may be," said T�rin. "I will look first." Then he went in with M�m, and
the others, seeing him unafraid, followed behind, even Andróg, who most
misdoubted the Dwarf. They were soon in a black dark;
but M�m clapped his hands, and a little light appeared, coming round a corner:
from a passage at the back of the outer grot there stepped another Dwarf
bearing a small torch.
"Ha! I missed him, as I feared!" said Andróg. But M�m spoke quickly with the
other in their own harsh tongue, and seeming troubled or angered by what he
heard, he darted into the passage and disappeared. Then
Andróg was all for going forward. "Attack first!" he said. "There may be a
hive of them; but they are small."
"Three only, I guess," said T�rin; and he led the way, while behind him the
outlaws groped along the passage by the feel of the rough walls. Many times it
bent this way and that at sharp angles; but at last a faint light gleamed
ahead, and they came into a small but lofty hall, dim-lit by lamps hanging
down out of the roof-shadow upon fine chains. M�m was not there, but his voice [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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