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sounds of fighting again. He was about halfway down when out of the dark gate into the red glow came two orcs running. They did not turn his way but were making for the main road, when they fell and lay still. Apparently they had been shot down by others from the wall of the lower course or from the shadow of the gate.(3) After that no more came out. Sam went on. He came now
    [to] the point where [the] descending path hugged the lower wall of the tower as it stood out from the rock behind. There was a narrow angle there. He stopped again, glad of the excuse; but he soon saw that there was no way in. There was no purchase in the smooth rock or [? jointed] masonry and 100 feet above the wall hung beetling out. The gate was the only way.

    Here the first draft stops. Thus the entire passage in RK (p. 177) in which Sam is tempted to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, his mind filling with grandiose fantasies (deriving from those of Frodo on Mount Doom in outlines I and II, pp. 5 - 6), is lacking; but at the point where the draft ends my father wrote (dearly at the same time): Sam must not wear Ring. No doubt it was this perception that caused him to abandon this text.
    He began at once on a second draft, 'B', for most of its length written legibly in ink, with the number 'LII'(4) and the title 'The Tower of Kirith Ungol'. This opened in the same way as did A (p. 18): 'For a while Sam stood stunned before the closed door. Far within he heard the sounds of orc-voices clamouring...' In the fair copy manuscript of
    'The Choices of Master Samwise' it had been said (following the original draft) that 'Sam hurled himself against it, and fell', changed in pencil to 'Sam hurled himself against the bolted plates, and fell to the ground.' This was repeated in the first typescript of that chapter; only in the second typescript was the word 'senseless' introduced. The explanation of this is that while writing the present draft B of 'The Tower of Kirith Ungol' my father was struck by a thought which he noted in the margin of the page, telling himself that he 'must leave time for Frodo to recover and to fight'(5) and that in order to achieve this

    'Sam must swoon outside the undergate.' It was no doubt at this time that he changed the opening of B:

    For a while Sam stood dumb before the closed door. Then desperate and mad he charged at the brazen door, and fell back stunned; down into darkness he sank. How long it lasted he could not tell; but when he came to himself still all was dark.

    Against the passage in the draft A referring to other events in the world at that hour (p. 18) my father noted: 'Make Frodo and Sam one day more in Ephelduath. So Frodo is captured night of 12, when Merry was in Druadan Forest and Faramir lay in fever and Pippin was with the Lord, but Aragorn was manning his fleet.' In B the passage now becomes:

    Out westward in the world it was deep night upon the twelfth of March by Shire-reckoning, three days since he and Frodo had passed the peril of Minas Morgul; and now Aragorn was manning the black fleet on Anduin, and Merry in the Forest of Druadan was listening to the Wild Man, while in Minas Tirith the flames were roaring and [the great assault upon the Gates had begun >] the Lord sat beside the bed of Faramir in the White Tower.

    Against 'March' in this passage my father scribbled in the margin:
    'Make Hobbit names of months.'
    At the point where Sam at the crest of the pass looked out over Mordor to Orodruin ('the light of it ... now glared against the stark rock faces, so that they seemed to be drenched with blood', RK p. 176) my father halted briefly and wrote the following note across the page: Change in the Ring as it comes in sight of the furnace where it was made. Sam feels large - and naked. He knows that he must not use the Ring or challenge the Eye; and he knows he is not big enough for that. The Ring is to be a desperate burden and no help from now onwards.

    The Tower of Kirith Ungol is still