Chapter 17: Sméagol Introduces Himself as the Future

The Emyn Muil arrived as a geological argument — the land's patient insistence that the path we believed ourselves to be navigating had never, in any operative sense, existed.

I had been tracking the anomaly for two days before I was prepared to enter it into the ledger: the rock did not reflect light in the manner of limestone or sandstone or any stratum I possessed vocabulary to classify, but instead seemed to receive it, to take the grey morning into itself through a process closer to digestion than reflection. The hills rose in configurations that my eye repeatedly attempted to resolve into pattern — the brain's persistent, merciful habit of imposing order upon what resists it — and that repeatedly declined to be resolved. Each approach confirmed what the prior approach had failed to disprove. The geometry was not wrong in the way that the Shire's evening geometry had been wrong, which was to say obliquely, suggestively, in the manner of a familiar word glimpsed in peripheral vision and found, upon direct examination, to have acquired a letter it had not previously possessed. The geometry here was wrong in the manner of a geological formation that had arranged itself prior to the existence of any organizing principle capable of perceiving geometry as a category at all.

Sam walked close. He had not said anything of substance since we crossed the Anduin, which I attributed not to depletion but to a particular quality of attention he appeared to be directing toward the maintenance of forward motion — each step individually decided, in the manner of a man navigating ice who has learned that the next footfall requires his complete present consideration. He carried his pack slightly higher on his shoulders than usual. I noted this and filed it without analyzing what it indicated.