*The There and the Far Below: Being an Account of My Most Unexpected Journey, Its Curious Incidents and Their Various Resolutions, Composed in Retirement at Greyfoot Hall, Mirelands, in the Sixty-Third Year Following*
*By Mr. Bilbo Greyfoot, Gentleman of the Mirelands, Honorary Member of the Aelindrath Society of Letters, Retired*
*[The following text is reproduced from the original manuscript held in the Aelindrath Archive, catalogue reference GF-7741. Annotations appearing in the margins of the original are here presented in brackets and italics, distinguished from the main text by their differing ink — a darker, bluer-black applied in a hand that, across the manuscript's length, undergoes changes this editor has chosen not to describe beyond the clinical notation that the pressure applied to the page increases measurably with each successive entry, until the final annotations, where the paper has been scored. — Compiler's note.]*
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Chapter the First, in Which I Depart from the Mirelands to Considerable Local Disapproval and Discover Immediately That the Road East Is More Road Than I Had Been Led to Expect
I remember the morning I left quite clearly, which is more than I can say for several mornings since, and the memory is a pleasant one, taken on its own terms and held at the distance that good taste and advancing age permit. The fog was in, as it always is in the Mirelands of a spring morning — that particular Mirelands fog that does not dissipate so much as pause, gathered at the low edges of the fields like an audience waiting for something to begin. My door stood open behind me. My bag, considerably larger than any bag my neighbors had occasion to carry, was settled on my shoulders with the resigned familiarity of luggage that knows it is going regardless of its preferences.
*[Margin, early hand, ink faded brown: The fog was wrong that morning. I wrote pleasant because I wished it to have been pleasant. I have wished many things in this composition. The fog did not pause. It attended.]*
Mrs. Turnmallow from the farm adjacent shouted something from her gate that I chose at the time to interpret as well-wishing. Barton Hedgewick, the eldest of the Hedgewick clan and a man who had appointed himself the unofficial register of neighborhood impropriety, watched from his porch with an expression I have since observed on the faces of people who are watching something they have decided to believe is only odd. I waved at both of them. I do not know why I remember this so clearly — the small comedy of departure, the fog, the bag — except that memory tends to apply lacquer to the last ordinary moment before the extraordinary one, and the morning I left the Mirelands was the last time I stood in a world that was only what it appeared to be.
The road east from Mire's End is not a road that anyone would call beautiful, or interesting, or conducive to the kind of contemplative walking that a hobbit of leisure might prefer on a clear afternoon. It is a road that exists because things must move between places, and it fulfills that function with a grey efficiency. Willows lean over its verge with the exhausted posture of things that have been leaning for longer than anyone presently alive can remember. The ground in the Mirelands holds water the way certain arguments hold their conclusions — quietly, thoroughly, with a confidence that occasional surface dryness does nothing to undermine.
*[Margin, early hand: I described the road east for eleven pages in the original draft and excised ten of them because my nephew Frodo, who read an early portion and is a boy of unusual sensitivity, told me that the road in my description felt like it was going somewhere other than east. I asked him what he meant. He thought for a time — he is a deliberate child, not slow but patient — and said it felt like it was going down. I restored his assessment here because it has remained more accurate than anything I wrote about the road itself.]*
I traveled east by northeast for the better part of three weeks before the road introduced me to Caric Stoneleigh, who was and remains the most well-armed man I have ever shared a campfire with. He was a soldier of the Eastern Reaches, he said, on patrol toward the ruins at Var Aethon, though he said this with the slight flattening of affect that professional men sometimes adopt when they are saying something technically true and substantially incomplete. He was carrying a sword of unfashionable length and a pack that clinked with the particular music of things that are meant to do damage. We walked together for four days and parted on agreeable terms, and he is the first of a long series of people in this account who were kind to me without, I came later to understand, knowing quite how to explain why they felt they should be.
*[Margin, different ink, slightly more pressured: I did not record what Caric told me on the third night. I had reasons at the time. My reasons at the time were that I was writing a cheerful account of a dragon-quest for my nephew and the neighbors, and that a cheerful account of a dragon-quest does not include what a soldier says at a campfire when he does not know he is speaking aloud. I record it now only as: he spoke of the eastern ruins and of a quality he called deepness that was not a quality of depth but of attention. He said that certain old places attend you. He said this in his sleep. In the morning, I asked him if he recalled the dream, and he said he did not dream.]*
But I proceed too quickly toward gravity, and this is, at its foundation, a memoir intended to entertain. Let me return to the lighter material, which there was also a great deal of, and which I have not been inventing.
The dragon — I shall call him Grimvar, as that is what he was called and I have no reason to withhold it — was an authentic and impressive beast of the old serpent lineage, dwelling in the mountain known locally as Redcrag and in possession of a hoard the accumulated valuables of which I estimated, during the long and unpleasant hours I spent in proximity to it, at something in excess of what any single creature could conceivably require. He slept atop it in the way that large, self-satisfied things sleep — heavily, with great theatrical regularity, and with one nostril perpetually slightly open in a manner that I attributed at the time to the instinctive vigilance of a predator, and which I have since attributed to other explanations that I will arrive at in due course.
*[Margin, darker ink, pressure increased: The dragon's hoard was not the reason.]*
*[Margin, same ink, same session: This is what I mean when I say I have been writing around it for sixty years. I wrote eight chapters about the dragon. The dragon is not the point of the dragon. Something sent me to the mountain and the mountain was not the destination.]*
I did not enter the mountain through the main passage. Any hobbit with the minimal self-preservation instincts that nature and upbringing provide would not enter the mountain through the main passage, which was occupied by a sleeping dragon of considerable dimensions, and hobbits, whatever their other deficiencies, have always been admirably practical about exits. There was a secondary entrance — a crack in the mountain's eastern face, low to the ground, well-concealed by a fall of shale that I moved with more ease than its dimensions suggested I should have been able to — through which I descended alone into the dark below Grimvar's chamber.
It was through this passage that I first came to the place I have spent sixty years writing around without naming.
*[Margin, darkest ink, paper scored faintly here: I want the reader to understand — and by reader I mean Frodo, because this is who I am writing to now, I have stopped pretending otherwise — that I entered that passage because I had evaluated it as the practical route to the hoard, and that this evaluation was correct on its face, and that the passage did lead, eventually, to a ledge overlooking the main chamber, and that from this ledge I was able to conduct the reconnaissance and subsequent negotiation that this memoir describes in Chapters Four through Eight. All of that happened. I wrote it accurately.]*
*[Margin, continuation, same session: What I did not write accurately, because I did not have the language, and then later did not write because I had the language and could see where it led, was the place the passage went through on its way to the hoard-ledge. The pit.]*
*[Margin, continuation: I have been calling it that for sixty years. The pit. As though it were a geological feature. As though things that are merely geological do not sometimes have characteristics one would not wish a geological feature to have.]*
The passage descended for what I measured as approximately eighty feet by boot-lengths — hobbits are, by the fortune of our stature, reliable measuring instruments in confined spaces — before it opened, without announcement, into a chamber of dimensions that the passage had given no indication of approaching. I could not see the ceiling. I could not, in the darkness, determine whether I stood at the edge of a pit or at its center or at some other spatial relationship to its extent that my vocabulary does not have a word for.
I had a lamp. I lit it. The light behaved as light behaves — I note this because I have since been in places where it did not, and because in retrospect the lamp's steady, ordinary behavior in that chamber is itself something I find worth recording. The light showed me walls of a dark stone I did not recognize, dressed with a regularity of tool-marks that I interpreted at the time as ancient mining, and which I have since understood was something more purposeful and less extractive.
The floor was level. The floor, in a natural cavern of that depth and dimension, has no business being level.
*[Margin: He knew I was there. I want to be precise about this. It was not that something noticed my entry and turned its attention to me. It was that I had been there before I arrived, in the sense that the place knew my particular quality of arrivals — the thinness of my attention, which I had always thought of as curiosity but which functions, I now understand, as a kind of porousness — and had been ready for the kind of arriving I do. The pit was not dark by accident. It was dark by preference.]*
I crossed the floor of that chamber in two hundred and twelve steps, which I counted because counting is what one does when the alternative is listening to what the silence in the deep places contains. The silence in ordinary places is an absence. The silence in the pit was a presence of considerable density — not sound, but something for which silence is a poor container because silence implies simply the lack of sound, and what I heard beneath the silence that night was not a lack of anything.
*[Margin: It is like this: imagine that you have lived your entire life hearing a note at the very bottom of what your ears can accept. So low that you assumed it was the ear itself, some bodily resonance, some artifact of blood moving through the small passages behind hearing. And then you descend eighty feet into a mountain and the note becomes clear. Not louder. Clearer. As though the mountain removed an intervening membrane. As though you had been hearing it filtered through every surface of the world above, every field and wall and polite conversation, and the mountain simply removed the filtration. I stood in the pit and I heard it clearly and I found, to my considerable alarm, that it was familiar.]*
I found the Ring on the pit's far side.
It is a plain thing. I want to be very plain about how plain it is — I say this because subsequent persons who have encountered the Ring have described it with an elaborateness of language that I believe reflects their own impressions rather than its actual appearance. It is a circle of metal the color of old gold, without inscription or decoration on its outer surface, small enough to fit easily on a hobbit's finger. It was lying on the floor of the pit as though it had been set there by a hand that knew how to set things for the kind of finding that thin-minded people do.
*[Margin, final annotation on this page, written with extraordinary pressure and then partially scratched out so that only fragments remain legible: it was not lost — it was — the placing of — something that has known — every quiet room where I — the membrane — [scratched out] — Frodo do not — ]*
I picked it up. I put it in my waistcoat pocket. I climbed back through the passage and spent the remainder of that adventure in the manner recorded in Chapters Four through Eight, and it was, in the main, a successful adventure, and I returned to the Mirelands with a modest portion of Grimvar's hoard and an expanding reputation for eccentricity, and I have been here since, writing.
The memoir will resume in the subsequent chapter with an account of the negotiation with Grimvar, which contains several incidents of genuine humor, and I recommend it to any reader who has come to this volume for entertainment. It is the account I intended to write.
*[Margin, final page annotation, written in the cramped hand that appears only in the latest additions, ink very dark, the letterforms unfamiliar compared to the careful script of the main text:]*
*[I have been here since writing and the Ring has been in the drawer of the study table and at night the study table is in the room adjacent to where I sleep and the distance between us has become across sixty years the most important distance I have ever attempted to maintain. It has been patient with me. I want Frodo to understand that it has been patient in the way that something patient is patient when patience is not required of it because the outcome has already been established. I have been writing around this for sixty years and the writing has not been armor it has been practice. Practice for the kind of mind that sits in a room with a thing and allows the thing to be in the room. I am very good at this now. I have become very thin about it. This is the last margin in this section of the volume and I want to say clearly that the pit was not a pit in the geological sense it was a place where the membrane is thin enough to hear through and I heard through it and the thing I heard was not evil it was not evil it was old it was patient it had known my name for longer than names have — ]*
*[The annotation ends here. The following page is the title page of Chapter Two, which concerns the qualities of Mirelands fog and contains no margin notes.]*