Chapter 11: Balin's Tomb and the Record That Stops Mid-Sentence

The Chamber of Mazarbul announced itself first through a change in the quality of the dark.

I had been cataloguing the dark's qualities for four days with the systematic attention of a man who has accepted that the instrument doing the measuring has been recalibrated and must now be operated by different procedures. There was the dark of the First Hall, which had a density suggesting long accumulation — not the mere absence of light but its negation, a positive condition that the light from Greyvast's staff did not so much penetrate as visit. There was the dark of the middle passages, which was older and thinner simultaneously, compressed by geological time into something almost translucent in its depth. And there was, on the fifth day of our descent through the Dwarrowdelf, the dark of the Chamber of Mazarbul, which was different from either of these in a way that I perceived first through the Ring and second through my eyes and arranged, afterward, in a sequence that may not have been the sequence in which it actually occurred.

The Ring had been pointing downward through the rock for four days with the patient insistence of a compass needle held above something of sufficient magnetic mass. In the Chamber, it changed orientation. Not dramatically. Not in the manner of a thing suddenly urgent. It shifted the way a needle shifts when the thing it has been tracking from a distance has, at some point during the approach one did not mark as significant, become the thing directly beneath one's feet.