Mists curled and smoked from dark and noisome pools. The reek of them hung stifling in the still air. Far away, now almost due south, the mountain-walls of Mordor loomed, like a black bar of rugged clouds floating above a dangerous fog-bound sea. The remainder of that journey was a shadow of growing fear in which memory could find nothing to rest upon. For two more nights, they struggled on through the weary pathsless land. The air, as it seemed to them, grew harsh, and filled with a bitter reek that caught their breath and parched their mouths. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomitted the filth of their insides upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like a graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.