Chapter 10: The Mines of Moria, Stratum by Stratum

The doors were already there before we found them.

I mean by this something more precise than the ordinary metaphor of discovery: that in the three days of searching the cliff-face above Mirrormere, retracing ground that Greyvast mapped and remapped with the methodical persistence of a man correcting a calculation whose error he suspects but has not yet isolated, I came increasingly to feel that the Gate of the West did not wait for us in the passive sense that objects wait for hands, but in the active sense that certain kinds of knowledge wait — with an attention of its own, oriented toward a particular consciousness, patient in the manner of something that has had very long to develop its patience. When the moonlight finally struck the hidden inscription and the doors remembered themselves out of the cliff-face, the silver lines blooming in the dark with the serenity of a diagram rather than the surprise of a revelation, I noted in the interior archive under the category I had not yet named that the doors revealed themselves as though completing a gesture already begun.

I did not share this impression.