By that time the dwarves had gone on again, a long, long, way on into the dark tunnels of the goblins’ realm. When the goblins discovered that, they chose their quickest runners with the sharpest ears and eyes. These ran forward silently. That is why neither Bilbo, nor the dwarves, nor even Gandalf heard them coming. They didn’t see them, either. But the goblins saw them.
Quite suddenly Dori, carrying Bilbo, was grabbed from behind in the dark. He shouted and fell; and the hobbit rolled off his shoulders into the blackness, bumped his head on hard rock, and remembered nothing more.
Chapter 5
Riddles in the Dark
When Bilbo opened his eyes, it was dark. He could hear nothing, see nothing, and he could feel nothing except the stone of the floor.
Suddenly his hand felt a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. He put the ring in his pocket almost without thinking. Then his hand came on the hilt of his little sword – the little dagger that he got from the trolls, and that he had forgotten.
Somehow he was comforted. He had noticed that such weapons made a great impression on goblins.
At last Bilbo got up and walked with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall. The tunnel seemed endless. On and on he went, and down and down; and still he heard no sound of anything. Suddenly he got into water! It was icy cold. The sword was hardly shining at all. He stopped, and he could hear, when he listened hard, drops dripping from an unseen roof into the water below.
“So it is a pool or a lake, and not an underground river,” he thought. Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. He had two big round pale eyes in his thin face. He had a little boat, and he rowed quietly on the lake; for it was a lake, wide and deep and deadly cold. He looked for blind fish, which he grabbed with his long fingers. He liked meat too.
Actually Gollum lived on a slimy island of rock in the middle of the lake. He was watching Bilbo now from the distance with his pale eyes like telescopes. Gollum got into his boat and moved from the island, while Bilbo was sitting and thinking. Suddenly Gollum came up to the hobbit.
Bilbo jumped nearly out of his skin when he suddenly saw the pale eyes looking at him.
“Who are you?” the hobbit said, holding his dagger in front of him.
“And you?” whispered Gollum.
“I am Mr Bilbo Baggins. I have lost the dwarves and I have lost the wizard, and I don’t know where I am.”
“What have you got in your hands?” said Gollum, looking at the sword, which he did not quite like.
“A sword which came out of Gondolin!”
“Well,” said Gollum, and became quite polite, “perhaps you like riddles. Let’s play.”
“Very well,” agreed Bilbo. “You ask first,” he said, because he had not had time to think of a riddle.
So Gollum hissed:
“What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?”
“Easy!” said Bilbo. “It’s a mountain, I suppose.”
“Was it so easy? Let’s have a real competition! If I ask, and you don’t answer, I will eat you. If you ask me, and I don’t answer, then I will do what you want, okay? I will show you the way out, yes!”
“All right!” said Bilbo.
“Thirty white horses on a red hill,
First they champ,
Then they stamp,
Then they stand still.”
It was rather an old riddle, and Gollum knew the answer:
