Places in Middle-earth
Sauron's Road
Type: Roads, Lanes, Ways
Region: Mordor/Allies
Other Names
The Road from Barad-dûr to the Sammath Naur
Location: A road in Mordor built by Sauron from the tower of Barad-dûr westwards to the Chambers of Fire in Orodruin.
Description:
But already Sam was more than half way up the base, and the plain of Gorgoroth was dim below him.... As he looked up he would have given a shout, if his parched throat had allowed him; for amid the rugged humps and shoulders above him he saw plainly a path or road. It climbed like a rising girdle from the west and wound snakelike about the Mountain, until before it went round out of view it reached the foot of the cone upon its eastern side.
The Valley of Gorgoroth, showing Sauron's Road running west from the Barad-dûr to Orodruin.
Sam... guessed that if he could only struggle on just a little way further up, they would strike this path. A gleam of hope returned to him.... 'Why, it might have been put there a-purpose!' he said to himself....
He did not know it, but he was looking at Sauron's Road from Barad-dûr to the Sammath Naur, the Chambers of Fire. Out from the Dark Tower's huge western gate it came over a deep abyss by a vast bridge of iron, and then passing into the plain it ran for a league between two smoking chasms, and so reached a long sloping causeway that led up on to the Mountain's eastern side. Thence, turning and encircling all its wide girth from south to north, it climbed at last, high in the upper cone, but still far from the reeking summit, to a dark entrance that gazed back east straight to the Window of the Eye in Sauron's shadow-mantled fortress. Often blocked or destroyed by the tumults of the Mountain's furnaces, always that road was repaired and cleaned again by the labours of countless orcs....
They came to the path and found that it was broad, paved with broken rubble and beaten ash....
Again he lifted Frodo and... struggled off along the climbing road. It was not as easy a way to take as it had looked at first. By fortune the fires that had poured forth in the great turmoils when Sam stood upon Cirith Ungol had flowed down mainly on the southern and western slopes, and the road on this side was not blocked. Yet in many places it had crumbled away or was crossed by gaping rents. After climbing eastward for some time it bent back upon itself at a sharp angle and went westward for a space. There at the bend it was cut deep through a crag of old weathered stone once long ago vomited from the Mountain's furnaces....
The path climbed on. Soon it bent again and with a last eastward course passed in a cutting along the face of the cone and came to the dark door in the Mountain's side, the door of the Sammath Naur....
The Return of the King, LoTR Book 6, Ch 3, Mount Doom
Contributors:
Elena Tiriel 6May05, 26Sep10
