When they had come to a place where there was a little pool
in a hollow of the rocks they made stay there, and slept safe,
but ill-lodged, and on the morrow were on their way betimes,
and went toiling up the neck another four hours, and came to a
long rocky ridge or crest that ran athwart it; and when they
had come to the brow thereof, then were they face to face
with the Great Mountains, which now looked so huge that they
seemed to fill all the world save the ground whereon they stood.
Cloudless was the day, and the air clean and sweet, and every
nook and cranny was clear to behold from where they stood:
there were great jutting nesses with straight-walled burgs
at their top-most, and pyramids and pinnacles that no hand
of man had fashioned, and awful clefts like long streets
in the city of the giants who wrought the world, and high
above all the undying snow that looked as if the sky had come
down on to the mountains and they were upholding it as a roof.
But clear as was the fashion of the mountains, they were yet a long
way off: for betwixt them and the ridge whereon those fellows stood,
stretched a vast plain, houseless and treeless, and, as they beheld
it thence grey and ungrassed (though indeed it was not wholly so)
like a huge river or firth of the sea it seemed, and such indeed
it had been once, to wit a flood of molten rock in the old days
when the earth was a-burning.
Now as they stood and beheld it, the Sage spake:
"Lo ye, my children, the castle and its outwork, and its
dyke that wardeth the land of the Well at the World's End.
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