'Dwarves, Men and Elves, terrible Elves with bright eyes.'  

  'He has a mind of metal and wheels.'  

  One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present -- like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake.  

  'I don't know,' said Frodo in a dreamlike voice. 'But I have seen them too. In the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep, deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.'  

  Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.  

  And thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems, mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones.  

  Presently, it brought them to a small clear lake in a shallow dell: it lay in the broken ruins of an ancient stone basin, the carven rim of which was almost wholly covered with mosses and rose-brambles; iris-swords stood in ranks about it, and water-lily leaves floated on its dark, gently rippling surface.  

  It waded deep, as if it were heavily burdened, and it seemed to me as it passed under my gaze that it was almost filled with clear water from which came the light; and lapped in the water a warrior lay asleep.  

  Sam had noticed that at times a light seemed to be shining faintly within; but now the light was even clearer and stronger. Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealled in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmered: 'I love him. He's like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him whether or no.'  

  Wide flats lay on either bank, shadowy meads filled with pale white flowers. Luminous these were too, beautiful and yet horrible of shape, like the demented forms in an uneasy dream; and they gave forth a faint sickening charnell-smell; an odour of rottenness filled the air. From mead to mead the bridge sprang. Figures stood there at its head, carven with cunning in forms unhuman and bestial, but all corrupt and loathsome. The water flowing beneath was silent, and it steamed, but the vapour that rose from it, curling and twisting about the bridge, was deadly cold.