The Hobbit / Хоббит. 10 класс - стр. 17
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:
“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.
It was rather an old riddle, and Gollum knew the answer:
“Teeth! Teeth!” Then he asked another riddle:
Poor Bilbo sat in the dark thinking of all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres he had ever heard, but not one of them had done all these things. He had a feeling that the answer was quite different and that he should know it, but he could not think of it. He began to get frightened, and that is bad for thinking. He wanted to shout out: “Give me more time! Give me time!” But all that came out was: