Morgai

The Morgai was a mountain range that ran parallel to the northern Ephel Dúath on its eastern side.

Biology

In the glens of the Morgai grew low scrubby trees, coarse grey grass-tussocks, withered mosses, brambles, some with long thorns or hooked barbs with maggot-ridden buds and briar-thickets. Midges and dun, grey or black flies with an eye-shaped blotch lived in the Morgai. The tops of the Morgai were without vegetation.

The Morgai rose on the eastern side of a valley formed by it and the Ephel Dúath to its west. Its ridge line was much lower than that of the Ephel Dúath, and was notched and jagged with fang-like crags. The valley sloped up gently northward with a stream bed at its floor fed by the two mountain ranges. The stream bed was dry when Frodo and Sam descended into the valley on their Quest for Mount Doom. A track left the Morgul-road at the western bridge-end and went down by a long stair to the bottom of the valley. The track went north to lesser posts and strongholds between the Tower of Cirith Ungol and the Isenmouthe. Further north of the point where Frodo and Sam had descended into the valley a streamlet flowed from a gully on the western side. Water also trickled down a source higher up in the valley side and fed there dark pools in the river-bed.

The Morgai formed the inner wall of the fences of Mordor. The road that came over the Morgul Pass was joined by a road that came winding down from the Tower of Cirith Ungol. A short way after the meeting of those two roads and following a steep incline, the road crossed a bridge of stone over the trough between the Ephel Dúath and the Morgai. The road then went on through a jagged rift in the Morgai out into the valley of Gorgoroth to Barad-dûr.