(Day 2)
Attention Peter Jackson: we have found Mirkwood for you! Mirkwood has skeletal leafless birch trees, pallid in the mist, and diseased skinny fir trees whose branches splay out feebly. The two grow so closely that in places a child could not get between them. It has swampy fens with dead vegetation. In some of the fens, some violently red algae grows on the rocks beneath the water, so that as you are driving by them, you suddenly realize that the marsh flows blood-red. In addition, the marshy ground buckles and freezes an unpleasant curdled yellow. There are blotchy bulbous lichens in gray and brown and pallid green. It is lovely and hideous at once, and the presence of giant spiders would not surprise me in the least.