#doves charnel

[necrobratz]

more of them 😚 this time we got erm. mrs emily and the puppet >_O idk why tumblr insists on destroying the quality of these but like idk ignore it or something ❤️❤️

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

Black Femme Character Dependency Dark Skin Directory: C

C: The Characters

Caprice Winters GBF | Carmen Eguiluz Always a Witch | Carol Friday Night Funkin | Carol Lockhart Hunters | Carole Clarke This Is Us | Catherine Halliday Luther | Catty Noir Monster High | Celeste Bisme Lyons Years and Years | Celie Johnson The Color Purple | Chantelle Blades Passion Fish | Charlotte Page Henry Danger | Cherise High Fidelity | Chondra Unkrich YIIK: A Postmodern RPG | Clash Rainbow Six Siege | Claudia Grant Robotech | Cleo Sowande Legacies | Cleopatra Jones | Cobra Big Hero Six | Coffee Cowboy Bebop | Cocoa Cookie Cookie Run | Coco Conners Dear White People | Coco Monvoisin Serpent and Dove | Conny Spalding Two Can Play That Game | Cressida Into the Badlands | Cynthia Rose Adams Pitch Perfect

C: The Entertainers

Camille Winbush | Caroline Chikezie | Ceval Omar | Chanelletime | Charlayne Woodard | Charnele Brown | Chinenye Ezeudu | Chiquita Fuller | Christine Adams | Cicely Tyson | Coco Jones | Colette Dalal Tchantcho | Condola Rashad | Crystal Clarke

[cymorilcinnamonroll]

Regina Angelorum (Virgin Mary x Archangel Michael One Shot)

He knelt before his Queen, dressed in knightly raiment. She smiled beneficently upon him, right hand raised in the sign of redemption. The Queen of Angels occupied her throne like a dove its silver cage: all beauty and whiteness, she was thronged by the purest of seraphim, ringed by soft wings and power. And she, their sun, fed them her manna of light. “Oh Michael,” she said, voice like a clarion bell. The blond stone chapel she occupied echoed with her presence. Michael gazed upon her, clad in heavenly blue and all the beauty of the cosmos. Even he, most ancient of all, lost his breath each time he saw her. Her crown was her humility, her queenship boundless love.

She pressed her fingers to his brow, face tender as she looked upon his wounds. Cool softness flowed through him as she healed her champion, most high of angels. It was only with her the archangel wore the ghost of a smile. “You feel broken, Michael,” she said softly. “Let down your burden. Be at peace.” Her angels raised their voice in song. Like Aphrodite's Graces, their tune painted the air with flowers, liker the sweetness of lost dreams. It was a perfume of the moon and desert nights. It wrapped around him like a cloak, filling him with light.

“Thank you,” he whispered, sword resting on his knee. He took his crimson sash, pressed it to his cheek. It smelt of her- the promise of redemption. He carried it with him always, like crusaders their ladies' handkerchiefs. Its end was wrapped around her wrist, the symbol of their bond.

He remembered her in the moonlight, in the windswept hills of Lorraine. She'd worn the form of a maiden then, old memories washed like dirt from a blouse. All the stains of eternity had been lifted from her. Michael had reeled, struck with awe, at his Queen who did not know her name. The innocence he never dared to see again played across her fragile face, like ripples of sun on the sea. Her cheeks bloomed in the cool air as she laughed, chasing a stray lamb.

He almost hadn't appeared to her, wanting to let that beautiful girl run into eternity, through golden fields that had never seen blood. He cared not that the Host dressed black in mourning, bereft of their beloved. As long as she was happy. It was Michael's driving force.

He could not forgive himself. He'd given that cross up long ago. He paused in remembrance: he had come to her after the Fall, stained her robe with his blood as he wept into her arms. Their tears had formed the Euphrates and all the rivers of Eden. And so he took Lucifer's place, as her confidant and warden. He killed in her name, bore her hatred as he executed the harsh choices she was too pure to make. He bore her rage, too- suffered her anger in silence. Nothing was more painful than that. It had bit his skin as the flames licked her flesh. Her tongue had poisoned him as she wasted away in a dank prison cell: “Michael, Michael, my light. You have betrayed me. I did everything you asked of me. You said I would be free. I am too young!”

She would always be too young. The youngest sister of the angels, the Host's crown jewel. He had embraced her on her pyre. “I'm sorry, girl. I'm sorry.” She could not hear him through her rage. It was then that the archangel knew what Samael had suffered when his human was torn from him. That death, the death of his Queen, changed Michael irrevocably. He finally saw the face of mortality: it was repulsive. Like flies.

The reaper appeared at the charnel grounds. He watched her murderers placidly. “Maggots,” Samael called them, eating his wormy pomegranate. “Like larva they crawl from the water, molt into mayflies, then die.” He looked pensively at the rotten fruit, which had withered since humans had tasted it. He had come to collect her soul.

“Do not take her.” Michael seethed, spitting at his twin.

Samael shrugged. “You would have me defy Her will?” He smirked, looking at the skeleton Michael clutched.

Michael wept into her charred remains. Loathing himself, he released her soul. For a moment, Samael and the Queen were reunited, like the primordial days before. For a moment, she did not recognize him “Lucifer?” she sighed. “Take me home.”

Just like Gabriel's laugh became darker after he walked among men, something in Michael cracked. He smiled coldly at Samael. “Enjoy her grace while it lasts. But lay a hand on her, serpent, and I will flay you.”

Samael laughed roughly, ferrying her soul into the void. “I wouldn't dream of it. I no longer need grace.” He said the word like a curse.

[libidomechanica]

Hang the labour like the firmament of heroic touch

A charnel; fear and wives! Who is it then as a sponge drinks another close bleeding prey: theotormon’s limbs: he roll’d his weapons had not And those infamy is not attain’d to some unfooted plaine, dare the more to get her, but harder growes vpon a breaking billow; even while hid the fracture love the night of ioy, the hands they stand in world and liquid rest, forget thee. Me whereof immortall this sense, at which a dove trembling knees that yearnings spade. Consider this cool cell, far as the air it breath of man, that is there burn blue. Or to delight. Is in my simple sheep are made of!

[newsandletterscommittee]

currently obsessed with demonology of the working class by ross wolfe

[pixeldolly]

Walden BACC #998

Kate and the twins were all safely tucked away in bed by the time AIOS returned home, having helped dismantle a terrorist cell operating out of San Myshuno.

Walden looked peaceful as he flew overhead, and his sensors picked up only background noise - most residents were at home, sleeping, although he spotted the occasional straggler. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary night.

Then, his own house came into visual range, and AIOS saw the body floating in the pool, face down. It took him milliseconds to ascertain that it wasn’t Kate, Aster or Nova, but rather an adult alien woman.

Leann Zavala.

Like a rocket hurtling towards the ground, AIOS dove in after her - too late.��

He didn’t feel the cold shiver crawling up his spine, the sudden gust of wind that brought with it a charnel stench, but knew that she was dead.

His sensors told him as much. 

AIOS: “Kate, wake up. You must come with me.”

Kate: “Huh? AIOS? What’s wrong? Did something happen? Are the kids -”

AIOS: “Aster and Nova are fine. Leann, however, is dead.”

Suddenly and fully awake, Kate sat up bolt upright, gaping at AIOS in disbelief.

She was white as a sheet.

--------------------------------------------------

So, here’s the thing; I didn’t plan this at all! 🤯 Leann went for a swim in the pool - I thought, cool, visitors will get out and leave when they get too tired.

Except, she never did. I had even forgotten she was there, until I saw my Build/Buy buttons were greyed out and heard the eerie death music.

I have no idea if this was a glitch or what, but the fact is...Kate’s best friend drowned in her back yard while she slept.  😥

[dreamofcentipedes]

Red Lotus Blooms: 6 - To Ashes

Summary: A monster is forged in flame. As light burns out, red leaves unfurl. Chi She Lian fights its final battle, and Tatara's world is reduced to ashes.

Characters: Tatara, Houji.

Rating: Teen Words: 8,219 Link to AO3

Link to Table of Contents.

A/N: I made an 8tracks for this series, if anyone's interested in some background music. Also, linguistic note, I'm British, so what I call the First Floor will be the Second Floor to American readers (we call the floor beneath the Ground Floor).

What they thought to be the remains of Fei Huo were recovered from a junkyard in the 5th District. They were charred and dismembered, with the kakuhou ripped out and harvested, but the Chi She Lian ceremonial garb together with the dry strands of white hair that still clung to the skull left little doubt. Fei, with no forewarning, had not come back to the mansion that night, so Yan had sent out scouts to search for her. This was what they returned with three days later.

Tatara saw it. There was little that could be done to prevent that, although Yan knew it was best not to shield the young man. Tatara had been so quietly concerned that he had wanted to join the scouts himself if Yan had not counselled him to avoid areas where the CCG had been active recently. He was too valuable a piece to lose so carelessly. A leader should know to pick their battles on their own terms and to delegate when necessary. He told him all this and he listened, but he had still waited ardently by the doorstep for days on end for the scouts’ return - and so he saw it.

An ice chilled over that fiery spirit. Yan could see it in his eyes. He sat there staring at the exploded limbs until Yan ordered them to be taken away, and sat staring at the same empty spot long after that. Eventually, he turned to his elder brother and spoke softly, but with something like a charnel rage consuming the light of his eyes.

“Who did this?”

“The doves. Our spies reported their presence in the 5th District recently, and there was no kakuhou in the body. It seems certain it was them.”

Tatara returned his eyes to the spot where the remains had been, boring a hole into the table with the force of his gaze.

“We’re going to destroy the doves, aren’t we?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Yan had to stifle his hesitation. Certainly, that had been the plan from the start, but that plan seemed to have gone hopelessly awry. A flock of doves may be coming to their doorstep soon enough, but with how little time they had to prepare, Yan could not be sure who would be destroying who. He had a few divisions of Chi She Lian troops standing by specifically out of caution for such an eventuality; the heightened CCG presence was obvious enough as it had considerably delayed his scouts’ efforts in locating Fei. However, it was not the army he needed, and he hated battles where he could not ensure victory.

But for Tatara’s sake, he inched closer and added.

“We’re going to kill every last one of them.”

Yan did not lay a comforting hand on his shoulder and he certainly did not embrace him, for he was not that kind of man. This was the only kind of comfort that he understood. And from the red-blooded bile flooding into Tatara’s face, he knew he understood it, too. It was the kind of comfort that made one strong.

Nevertheless, when Yan had left the room and shut the door into his study, that strength drained out of him. He collapsed into his chair and lay flat against the desk, staring at the wall.

He had failed.

He remembered the childish terror that had reawakened in him when he realised his parents had to be disposed of. He remembered how his father masked his heartbreak with paternal outrage, how his mother had looked at him with disdain and disappointment and fear, and how he made those faces unrecognisable. They had hit him again and again and again, but when it came his turn to hit them, they never got back up. That was the essence of the weak. When he escaped that smoking bier and saw Tatara’s frightened face waiting for him at the other end, he knew the path he had chosen was the right one. He knew what he was fighting to protect.

Everything I have done, I have done for my family.

But Fei could not see that. He could not make her see that. And because of that failure, she had…

Yan had organised a search of Fei’s room after he sent his scouts out. Her disappearance so soon after their argument felt too timely to be a co-incidence, and sure enough, he found two aeroplane tickets to Tokyo in her desk together with forged passports under different names for her and Tatara.

He could not know for sure what Fei had done, but the evidence suggested that she had intended to smuggle Tatara out from under his nose. It would have been easy for her to throw her family weight around and get one of the Lian ghouls to forge passports for her. Then she had engaged with the CCG, purposefully or otherwise, and…one way or another, it was clear that Fei had betrayed Chi She Lian. Yan could already smell the scent of annihilation seeping into his chambers.

He had already decided not to tell Tatara. That lust for vengeance would be the fuel he needed to survive the CCG onslaught. Telling him risked complicating that.

And - it would destroy him.

There had already been too much destruction. Yan was still waiting for the phoenix to rise out of it all. Wearily, he pulled himself out of his chair.

Perhaps not in my lifetime, Yan ruminated. Perhaps there needs be a bigger bonfire yet.

He stepped slowly to the great window at the back of his office that looked out over the Beijing skyline, illuminated by the radiant summer sky. Its enormity was breathtaking to this day.

Chi She Lian would live through Tatara. The dream, ghoulkind’s salvation, the nirvana outside this infinite cycle of suffering – he would realise it. Yan was fully confident that was how Tatara would choose. But he would have the ability to choose.

Then this, Fei, is my concession to you.

There was something remarkable about this final Beijing skyline. Like a fresh corpse, the city had stopped breathing. The roads were free of traffic, and the streets free of people.

The dove blockade had begun.

We will leave it to the man himself to decide which ghost he will honour.

--

It was such a normal summer’s day. The skies were bright and blue with great clouds roaming lazily along, and the breeze that met the hordes of CCG infantry barricading the roads of Xuhangli was fresh and pleasant. It was really a stomach-churning contrast. Even such a gentle breeze felt harsh to Houji, who had formed ranks with the rest without fully knowing what he was even doing here.

Wu had managed to summon a gargantuan force from the higher-ups when she submitted her report. After living in fear of Chi She Lian for so long, it should not be surprising that they would spare nothing when the opportunity came to finally crush them. Among the three hundred investigators stationed outside the Huo residence, there were sixteen Special Class Investigators including Wu and thirty of Associate Special Class. Nothing would be left to chance, it seemed.

The evacuation had been undertaken on the day itself, much to the surprise of the citizens – naturally nothing could have been announced in advance, lest they gave the game away – and now fences and tape and robust bulwarks had been erected in a wide radius around the mansion. All that was left was to huddle like sardines and wait for the order to advance and for the bloodbath to begin.

Lives would certainly be lost this day. Houji had written a testament, a practice he found, to his comfort, was in effect in China as well. It was something that, for the Clown Operation, he had put a lot of effort and thought into – showing his gratitude for the people who had brought him this far and honouring those he had lost along the way. His testament this time was also respectable to the uninformed eye. But not to Houji. This time, he could not write anything but a carbon copy of his previous testament. He had lost the will for anything more.

Packed tight against the hulking investigator who had murdered her colleague in cold blood, Houji wondered what would be on her testament. Would it be blank, like that of the quiet but phenomenal young investigator Kishou Arima? No. Certainly Arima’s testament in advance of the Clown Operation had surprised Houji at first, but, rather than an expression of carelessness, he had come to see how deeply it was true to Arima’s somehow empty nature. Wu’s nature could not possibly reflect such profundity. More likely she just wrote some crude joke.

He could not forget the looks on their faces as they had died – Jiang, and the ghoul too. How camaraderie and honour to one’s oath were discarded without a second thought, trampled on like trash. In trying to understand the events of that day, Houji had wracked his brains to reformulate his picture of Wu, and his efforts took him back to the day of his first encounter with Chi She Lian and the conversation he had had with her on the rooftop. It began to make sense – twisted, terrible sense, but the logic of the Whale was consistent. Where Houji had asserted the importance of working for the benefit of the whole, Wu had only ever spoken of her own advancement and her own satisfaction. She was an isolated unit in a swarming world, above its concerns and above its values.

And yet, she got results.

The thing that hurt Houji the most was that he could not even bring himself to hate Wu. She was the embodiment of a concept so beyond him that he could not feel so towards her any more than he could towards a tiger or a typhoon. Because of her callous, heartless actions, Chi She Lian would be wholly crushed. If she were not there that day, two highly dangerous ghouls from a legendarily powerful bloodline would escape to live another day, and there would be a chance the whole operation would be rumbled.

Houji had long been looking for the reason Wu held the high position she did against all the odds, and it was more than just her skill with a quinque. It was precisely this unpersonality of hers that allowed her to push the cause of the CCG so far forwards. No wonder she spent so much time investigating by herself. Houji remembered how she had told him and the rest of the team how they would only get in the way, and she was right. Not for lack of skill, but for lack of depravity.

So when the moment had finally come to take down Chi She Lian once and for all, Houji could take no pleasure at the prospect of avenging the deaths of his comrades over these past two and a half years. When thinking of the ghouls he was soon to exterminate, he could only think of the horror on that teenage girl’s face when Hollow had blown her to pieces.

In some ways Wu in her cavalier selfishness was more aware of what it really meant to be in the CCG than he had been. That was the reality Kousuke Houji found himself faced with. He felt the pull of two giants at his legs and shoulders: simultaneously, his desire to destroy Chi She Lian was weaker, while his imperative to do so was even stronger. His pity for Jiang and the ghoul was uncomfortably contrasted with ggrudging awe for the harsh necessities Wu espoused.

Houji truly hated the air here.

When the calm breeze began to blow more harshly, a voice was carried on the wind. A sharp voice in Mandarin was yelling out over a megaphone the order to advance. And Houji followed suit: because that was his role.

--

The building was quickly surrounded. The white shapes of the Chi She Lian ghouls inside the mansion rushed past Tatara, quickly assuming battle formations and erecting crude barricades in the hallways. The house was large, so there would be plenty of opportunities to catch the invading army off guard once they breached its walls. Yan had alerted the nearby Lian squadrons about the attack by telephone, although there was no telling how quickly the reinforcements could arrive on such short notice. Their small force would just have to hold their ground as long as possible against the white leviathan bellowing at their walls.

Moving to one of the windows, Tatara could see the ghouls burst out the doors en masse to intercept the advancing doves. Watching the ensuing carnage unfold, Tatara wished he could be down there. His bikaku unconsciously slipped out of his cloak and reflexively crunched the air within its grasp. He imagined a human head caught between its red veins, bleeding and then bursting apart until it was no more recognisable than what Fei had become.

The blood within his veins felt drier since then. A horrific emptiness had run from his brain down to his body when he was forced to look upon what had been his sister, stilling his body with cold like a needle.

He was glad the doves had come now. He was glad he was not forced to contemplate what exactly he had been fighting for all this time when his family had been laid dead at his feet once again. He was glad he was not forced to contemplate what he was even doing standing here. Now, he could feel a hellfire warming up his heart again, and he knew what he would do.

He would defend Yan. He would defend Chi She Lian. And he would avenge Fei a thousandfold. He would create a field of ashes where these human insects now swarmed.

He took out the aeroplane ticket from the forged passport Yan had given him and crumpled it in his fist. How could he expect him to run? It was the last thing he expected from Yan, even if it was only meant to be a last resort. He brushed his fingers against the cool red iron mask covering his mouth. He had even given him this. Tatara knew what it meant: he was trying to pass the torch down.

He had no intention of carrying it. If Yan went down, so would he, spoiling the snow-white feathers of these doves with blood along the way. He was fully healed from his encounter with the Longxia. He only stayed his feet now because he trusted Yan’s strategy; but as soon as the doves broke in, he had no intention of running.

He stuffed the items back into his pocket. Then he took up his position at the top of the tall, winding staircase, and hungrily waited.

--

Houji was already panting from exhaustion by the time they dealt with the outside forces. Chi She Lian ghouls were not easy prey. They had become savvy to methods of avoiding the destructive capabilities of Hollow, much to Wu’s annoyance, though each blast still left none ungrazed. Houji stood over the corpses and shook the blood off Iitsu before hearing yet another loud bang as Wu blew the mansion door down. Swept up with the tsunami of the crowd, already smaller than it had been when it arrived, he burst through the empty doorframe into a large mahogany hall, furnished with an onyx statue of a Chinese dragon and a red rug that led all the way up the winding staircase at the back.

There was little time to admire the décor. Immediately doors from either side of the hall burst open and white-cloaked assailants wielding glistening koukakus charged directly at them. Houji ducked in and out of the flurry of blades, spinning back and forth and carefully waiting for the right moment to lunge forward with his quinque. Thankfully, quinque combat was Houji’s specialty. He punctured one’s throat and disembowelled another, stabbing one through the eye and another through both cheeks. However, with this many assassins, even Houji’s dexterity could not avoid shallow cuts to the arms and legs, and the blood that mingled with his black battle gear was somewhere between ghoul and human.

He was the lucky one. The conflict spread out across the entire room, and, when he had eliminated enough blades lurching towards his face that for an instant he could breathe freely, he could see fallen bodies all across the long stretch. The lifeless arm of one investigator lay by his feet with a wedding ring on its finger, and further along he observed a decapitated human head slide across the gory floorboards. Houji felt another painful stab of misery when he realised it belonged to one of the men on his team. But within the room of screaming sound, Houji found he could not differentiate the cries of the humans from those of the ghouls.

The thought died as quickly as it appeared as Houji was quickly brought back into the fray with a barrage of shards from ukaku on the staircase. His head was now filled with nothing but the spike of adrenaline and the rhythms of battle. He rushed towards the enemy, slicing apart the shards in the air with the elegance of a duelist and shouting out a primal cry as Hollow’s explosions lit up the world behind him.

--

Tatara waited as he heard the instruments of war sounding off closer and closer. Risking a glance out the window, he noticed the few numbers of CCG who had remained outside the building were being thrown into disarray. The bloody shards he could see smash into their ranks confirmed it: at least one reinforcement group had arrived. He took solace at the greater chances of victory, but his itch remained unsatisfied. He could feel his whole body heating up as he prepared to rain down hell from above.

He heard one shout rising above the rest. Over a cacophony of cries of panic and the sound of blood spurting from fresh cadavers, a yell reverberated through the hallways as one tall, broad, inky-haired man emerged up the stairs onto the first floor clutching two long sanguine blades. Tatara was caught off guard by how quickly he seemed to be advancing on his own, and before he knew it, five, ten, fifteen other investigators followed him as he charged towards the dining room where Yan laid in wait. There was no more time.

Tatara threw himself off the railings of the second floor stairway and activated his half-kakuja in mid-air. As soon as his helmet was formed, he let out a titanic burst of flame. The landing and staircase both combusted and huge burning chunks of them tumbled down onto the investigators climbing up to the first floor. Some were crushed, some retreated, some fell through the floorboards, and when Tatara hit the first floor, a miserable number were directly incinerated.

As usual, the kakuja frenzied Tatara’s judgement, but the blind panic of the Longxia’s den had been replaced with the pure, undistilled fury that now guided Tatara’s every action. The same choler that had beheaded the Longxia in a single punch now unleashed itself in a Jurassic roar. The brute force of his kakuja’s pillar-like appendages swept like a bulldozer through the ranks of doves, knocking aside their quinques and cracking open their skulls again and again and again.

“FEEEIII!” The beast clamoured.

When the doves on the ground floor scrambled back in retreat from the young titan bathed in flame, the creature turned its head to the investigators behind it who had darted so nimbly past the ukaku guards. Most were speeding onwards to the dining room or breaking off into side rooms, but for a split-second Tatara caught the eye of the inky-haired man who, for a split-second, had stopped in his tracks and turned his gaze backward. For that split-second, Tatara recovered enough of his reason to acknowledge the look of misery on that man’s face, before the dove sped off and Tatara felt quinque bullets against his back. His ire boiled over again. He turned back to his enemies storming the stairs and scourged them with flails of red flame.

--

It was sheer chance that it was Houji who found the right door. Chance, or destiny. There was something about those grandiose, gold-panelled gates that spoke to him of the dragon’s lair. He pushed aside the enclosures with a sweep of his hand and came upon what must have been a dining hall. The chandelier still hung menacingly, but the chairs and long cloth-draped tables had all been pushed to the sides. There was only one thing that could catch one’s attention when entering that room.

The shadow of a colossus loomed large beneath the candlelight. At the end of the hall, the familiar cold blue flame burned expectantly at the head of the Herculean silver form of Houji’s old foe. The ghoul codenamed Loong. The business giant Yan Huo. The leader of Chi She Lian.

Houji’s concomitant investigators quickly formed ranks behind him amid gasps of fear. Houji immediately entered a defensive stance. This would decide it, he knew. In a closed-off room like this there could be no escape for either of them. This unrelenting tension of equal and opposite forces would finally yield a victor. Beads of sweat formed on Houji’s head as his heart began to beat faster. His body was ridden with the anxiety of a finish line.

He heard a great rumbling amidst the low roar of the fire. The demon began to speak in a voice like an earthquake.

“What is your name?”

The creature had no eyes he could see, but Houji knew it was talking to him, just like how he knew that it would be waiting in this room. Speaking to ghouls was ill-advised unless necessary, but somehow he felt compelled to give it at least this much.

“Kousuke Houji. First Class Investigator.”

There was a pause before the fiend posed its next question:

“Did you kill Fei?”

Houji’s face crumpled. Fei…Fei was her name. He remembered how the burning kakuja that had ambushed them had screamed her name. For a moment, that scorching abomination felt all too suddenly human. Now, the great grey nightmare hunching in front of him felt the same.

It did not change what he had to do.

“Yes.”

Because now, I am no different than her.

The sapphire flame seemed to glow all the brighter and spewed forth furiously from the sides of his bonelike helm. Yan Huo entered a battle stance. His voice was suffused with spite.

“Then your death will not be merciful.”

Houji felt his whole body tense with anticipation, gripping his quinque with an almost maniacal tightness as he stared down the grimness of the task before him. Then, slowly breathing out, he pressed down his emotions as he had become so accustomed to doing: as circumstances had forced him to do.

“Excessively passionate emotions rob one of their objectivity.”

More than a warning to his opponent, he meant it as a mantra to himself.

Inexorably, and with a final growl, his adversary charged forward.

--

Rage dominated Tatara. He was blind to the legions of doves assailing him, senseless to the quinques shattering against his skin, deaf to the shrieks of the pulverised investigators. All was the blood-rush of anger. There was only one thing he heard that pierced the roar of the rapids in his brain. A far-off sound, in the room he meant to defend. A man by the name of Kousuke Houji was in there now, who had just admitted to killing his sister.

He flung the investigators off him with a smash of his pole-like appendage and breathed fire at them so that they clambered away desperately, howling in pain from the burns. Using the moment’s opportunity, he turned around and began sprinting towards the dining hall.

The strategy had been to hold off the other investigators so that Yan would not be overwhelmed with too many enemies at once; that way he could concentrate on destroying the cream of the crop while Tatara dealt with the mounting piles of chaff. Tatara’s position on the stairway was also meant to ensure his greater mobility if the numbers became too much, thus allowing him to escape by retreating to a higher floor and heading to a window at the back of the building. Tatara had already set the upper stairway ablaze, lacking any such intention, and now he abandoned his position and Yan’s strategy to head directly into greater jeopardy. Wrath had overpowered anything left of reason, and his berserker mania would not tolerate the murderer behind him breathing a second more.

His turned back rendered himself vulnerable to the barb that nestled into his shoulder and blew open his carapace. Tatara’s great armoured weight plunged to the floor with a fierce thud. Infuriated by the obstruction more than the pain, he twisted his head around as he used his poles to push himself off the ground, and spied through the fumes a fat, grinning old lady dove wielding an ukaku quinque.

Rationality sparked in Tatara’s mind for a moment at the sight of her. Yan had warned him about this one: despite her appearance, she was highly dangerous. The Whale, they called her. Shouldn’t someone of her calibre have been in the vanguard? But before he could process anything further, another barb came flying directly at him.

The kakuja’s bestial instinct took over and swung its pole to knock the bolt aside where it exploded against a wall and burned a hole straight through it. Anger spiralling at the assault, Tatara barrelled directly at the Whale, belching out a protective blaze along the way. He was gaining on her like an enraged rhino and almost reached the staircase where she had taken up position before a missile exploded just below his feet and sent him flying backwards. His kakuja helmet cracked on impact with the ground and, with the scent of the smoky air that poured through, Tatara regained some of his logical faculties.

More and more barbs were flying around him and exploding in front of him so that he could not rise. The half-kakuja was just too heavy and unwieldy against this relentless onslaught of firepower. Tatara shot a quick look over his shoulder to where Yan was fighting the man called Houji. He could hear the sounds of combat within and he desperately wanted to join Yan, but, narrowly dodging another barb and shielding his face from the explosion, he knew there was small chance of that unless this woman was dealt with first.

He grasped the edges of his helmet from around the crack and, with a mighty tug, broke it off. Cracks ran through the rest of his kakuja which he smashed through, and extracting his more nimble, humane body from the shell, he darted liquidly in between the combustive arrows until he shot his bikaku kagune into the wall above her and swung up onto it. She could not turn around in time before Tatara descended on her, grasping at her eyes and beating at the sides of her head with a whirlwind of fists. She spat out blood, calling out the name “Jiang!” as if for help before cursing and bludgeoning her quinque against Tatara’s back - but he clung on, animalistically.

The other investigators took the opportunity to pour past the combatants towards the dining hall, as well as the investigators who had been searching the other rooms on the first floor and dealing with the Lian forces therein. The full mass of the doves on the ground floor could not completely push through, because of the fires ahead and the Lian reinforcements who had broken past the CCG barricade behind. Still, there were far too many getting past for Tatara’s liking. He gripped the sides of the Whale’s head, hoping to snap her neck and end it, before she suddenly threw herself backwards down the stairs.

Tatara instinctively leapt out of the way and launched his kagune into the high wall, pulling himself upwards; but his escape was hindered by an enormous strain on his leg, as the Whale clung onto it. His kagune was stretched taut and his leg screamed at the ligaments, but his ghoulish strength managed to handle the weight and he successfully pulled himself up close to the ceiling. He flung Wu off him with an asslike kick of his leg, and her grip finally relented, flying off onto the hitherto untouched second floor with a painful thud.

Now was the opportunity to finish her, while her old and frail body was winded. Tatara propelled himself onto the second floor and bore down on her with the razor-point of his kagune. Just as he moved into point blank range, the old lady swung out her quinque and cracked Tatara across the jaw, shooting him across the hallway. As Tatara pulled himself up, rubbing the wound, he saw she was standing again and was raising the quinque in his direction.

Tatara ran before the projectile obliterated the space where he was standing. He pelted down the narrow corridor to the left as barbs exploded in front and behind him. Whenever he tried to turn around and fight, a burst of flame would send him backing away again. Tatara gritted his teeth in frustration. This was not where he wanted to be. He should be down there, with Yan, fighting against Fei’s murderer. Instead, he was trapped in this narrow labyrinth, dodging pellets to the cackle of whalesong.

--

Special Class Li was the next body to join the towering inferno. He would be joining Special Class Gao, Special Class Wang, Associate Special Class Chen, and a whole host of other names that Houji had not had the chance to learn. All in all, well over fifty investigators had been slaughtered by Loong. The number of Special Classes and Associate Special Classes among them was, to Houji, an unbearable horror. The best and brightest of the Chinese CCG were being squashed like so many ants by this king of the urban jungle, the ghoul supreme.

The troops who had been with Houji at the start were obliterated almost immediately. He was exceedingly grateful for the reinforcements that arrived, but even with all their manpower they struggled to put a dent in Loong. No matter how many stratagems they devised, no matter how many beatings he took, he withstood it stalwartly before reducing his attackers to cinders. His onslaught was relentless, and as more and more warriors poured out against him, the frenzied speed of the battle seemed to last an eternity.

Houji realised what was different about this battle. It was the first time both parties were fighting without the intention of escaping. This was the reality of Loong’s strength when he had nothing to lose.

He was jolted out of his hopeless reverie by the shock of a sudden hand on his shoulder and a voice that had faded from his hearing.

“Houji! Houji! You’re Houji, right?”

Houji turned to face the voice, blinking away his horror. He vaguely recognised the square, middle-aged visage and close-cropped black hair of the man talking to him.

“Yes, that’s right. Special Class Zhao…?”

He gave a firm nod. “The boys say you have the most experience fighting this thing. You think you have a shot?”

Houji looked at him, dumbfounded. His eyes swam back to the battlefield, where Loong was decimating a squad wielding rinkaku quinques. Couldn’t he see the reams of far better men Loong had already stomped under heel? Zhao followed his eyes.

“Fair point.” He grumbled, massaging his temples between his stubby fingers. “I thought as much. But what if –” he briefly paused as though it was challenging to continue, before meeting Houji’s eyes with an intense stare. “What if we gave you an opening?

“An opening…?”

“A suicide charge.”

Houji was speechless. Then he was indignant.

“Special Class, how many investigators would –“

“How many investigators are already dying?” Zhao snapped back. “Caution is useless against this monster! Whatever happens, we need to nail Chi She Lian today. Forever. Or who knows how much more blood will be spilt? I’ll lead the charge, they’ll trust me. Then you need to take advantage of the distraction. Can you do it, Houji?!”

Houji felt a terrible frost inch over his neural matter. It felt as though the walls of his identity were narrowing more and more the longer he stayed here, the values he upheld, the principles he held dear, crushed mercilessly by their inwards march. Or worse – he would have to destroy them personally just to leave enough room for him to survive. Or what remains of him…

“Houji! There’s no time to vacillate, I need an answer!”

Houji’s head throbbed with the memory of that day. Yes, there were two deaths back then. Wu had killed Fei…and she had killed Jiang…

“Houji!”

“Yes!” He yelled, and then, controlling his voice to an even tone, “Yes. I will do it.”

He decided he would do what needed to be done. If he did not remain objective, then there was no telling where his emotions might take him.

Zhao gave a final nod and a lingering look that said he was counting on him, before he rushed off to rally the remaining fifty-odd people in the room to their almost certain deaths. Houji gripped his quinque with hands that were no longer shaking. There was a time before now when he had delivered a major blow to Loong, and if he had not retreated, perhaps he could have even finished him. That meant the lives lost here were already on his hands. There was only one way he could atone. By granting an ending to all of them. To all of this. A final stroke to put this whole sorry story to its conclusion, no matter the cost.

Houji replayed in his head his first encounter with Loong from all those years ago. He remembered it as clearly as if he had been shot back in time – every movement had imprinted itself precisely into his memory in the clarity of the near-death experience. Taking into account everything he had learned in their subsequent fights, he devised a plan.

When he saw Zhao leading masses of investigators in lotus formation against the platinum dragon, Houji lifted his feet off the ground and began to run. He sprinted against the backdrop of blue flame as warriors flung themselves into the air only to be crushed against the wall, pounded into the floor or broiled in ruthless calefaction – but they kept on coming. As Loong batted them off of him like flies and snorted out jets of flame, Houji found the opening they were sacrificing themselves to create.

Angling his body just right, he would slide beneath Loong like before and hit him right in the centre of his chest. When he fell to the floor, before he had the chance to breathe fire Houji would ram Iitsu into the opening of his helmet and finish him off. That was the plan. But when Houji glided across the floor to make the initial hit, Loong threw down his appendage.

He managed to roll out of the way at the last second. His eyes darted up to see the black void inside the helmet staring down at him with what looked like a forest of eyes masked in its shadow. That darkness was abruptly lit up by a luminous blue.

The stream of fire lurched to the side as Loong was struck in the face by an explosive projectile, narrowly missing Houji. The onslaught continued, explosive after explosive, while a sea of investigators hacked and slashed at Loong’s feet. Loong kicked and stomped at the investigators and threw up his great arms like a cross to shield his face.

Houji was struck with a sudden inspiration. If he did not strike now, he knew he would never have this opportunity again.

From his close position, he leapt right up into the air. Loong saw him coming, but his heavy arms were not fast enough, and Houji thrusted both spears of Iitsu through both of those arms at once. His armour had been weakened by the shells from the other investigators, so with a hefty feat of strength, Houji was able to crush the quinque through the layers of crust that remained. As Houji fell to the floor again and rolled to create some distance, he grabbed a quinque like a poleaxe from the body of an investigator covered head to toe in third-degree burns. Spinning around again to face Loong, he saw the kaiju shaking his arms in wild frustration as the weight of the quinque bore them down and letting out a low moan of pain.

In an instant, Houji was darting back again, his legs stamping against the burnt, broken and blood-slicken floorboards to propel himself over the immobilised arms of his foe and fly straight for the head. Before Loong could raise his head in time, the axe came crashing down, splitting the helmet apart and slicing through the flesh beneath.

The thought Houji had when the awaited moment finally came was strangely serene. It was: Rest now. Who those words were for, he could not say.

The axe completely its trajectory, and with one final howl, like a dying wolf at an unforgiving moon, the great kakuja collapsed on the floor. Houji landed on its legs, and saw, at the head of the beast, through the monstrous flesh that had covered it, something that had resembled the face of a man – now bloodied, now mutilated, but a man nonetheless. A ghoul…and a man.

Still panting for breath, Houji looked around the room to see what remained, or rather, who remained. He saw about ten people standing. They were about as noticeable as plankton in the expansive ocean of warm bodies piled dishonourably around the dining hall. It was an apocalypse of life.

Houji set his teeth together and scanned the room for Zhao. He found him, unconscious but alive, but for how much longer he could not say. His left arm had been torn clean off and blood was pouring out effusively. He had to receive medical attention immediately, and Houji almost left to call for a medic, before remembering that his mission was not yet complete.

Whatever happens, we need to nail Chi She Lian today. Forever. Or who knows how much more blood will be spilt?

That’s what Zhao had told him. They had dealt with the head of the snake, but that had not collapsed the organisation when Svarog died. Houji remembered in particular the smaller kakuja he had encountered on the stairway, and how similar it had looked to the corpse that now lay in front of him. So long as a single member remained, they would be a threat, and all the lives lost here today would mean nothing.

Tearing his eyes away from Zhao’s pitiful state, Houji pushed another survivor towards the casualty before running for the exit.

This ends today.

--

As he ran, a howl reached Tatara’s ears. He froze in his tracks, careless to the Whale’s pursuit. Wordlessly, it spoke to him, and he knew what it meant.

It was a howl like death.

The next barb the Whale shot out, Tatara caught by the tail and threw back at her. She narrowly dodged to the side with a yelp and fell on her back, when Tatara began storming towards her, his half-kakuja encircling him again mid-motion. The Whale fired off barb after barb at her approaching enemy and they all hit home, blowing up against Tatara’s chest and blasting off chunks of armour, but his pace did not slow in the slightest. He could not feel that pain above all the rest.

Now the Whale was scrambling to her feet, but when she finally managed to stand, Tatara had almost closed the distance. In a manic movement she jolted up her quinque and targeted her foe.

“Stay back, you overgrown lizard!”

His pace did not slow.

A beam of red hot flame roasted the Whale’s hand before she could pull the trigger. The quinque cluttered to the floor as she reeled back in horror. Tatara seized her by the neck. His voice gargled like a burning bush from the back of his throat.

“You shouldn’t have interfered.”

Then he set her on fire.

Her skin burnt up like dry parchment. The more she screamed, the tighter he gripped and the closer he moved, bringing the fire with him. The choked noises she eked out were hardly decipherable, words like “Stop!” and “Please!”, but they were lost in the discordant song of burning flesh and Tatara’s own screams, of hatred and Whale and Yan and Houji and failure. By the end of it, nothing escaped Tatara’s mouth but flame, and nothing escaped hers but smoke.

He flung her lifeless body to the ground and started walking back down the corridor.

It was not long before he collapsed. All of a sudden the pain from his wounds flooded through him, and it took a masterful effort of willpower to even stand back up. He had to keep moving. To avenge Yan. Kill Houji. Kill them all.

Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill-

He fell to the floor again, chipping his helmet. The ensuing rush of common sense was enough for him to realise it was useless. So he lay there, waiting for them to come to him. They could all go out in the same singular blaze.

There was nothing else left for him now, but to kill them.

The crack in his helmet spread, and the whole thing collapsed around him. A stab of fear plunged into him. What if he died before anyone arrived? How pitiful that would be. He did not want that. He could not let that happen. So again, he struggled to rise.

As soon as he was up, he had to press himself against a wall. His cheek brushed his hand and he felt the cold metal of Yan’s mask around his face. It was so icy it nearly brought tears to his eyes, but they would not come. It was as though the noxious heat had dried them all up inside of him. He had always hated crying. Now that door felt closed off to him forever, he supposed his wish had been granted. A barely audible laugh escaped his lips, muffled behind the mask, dry, bitter and cynical.

I wonder if this is how it felt, he wondered, to be Yan.

His brother never let a weak emotion show. Tatara did not know if he even had any. Always calm, collected, in control. It was that coolness that had kept Tatara safe, and had made Tatara strong. He had raised him up out of infantile vulnerability and made him the ghoul people spoke of as Salamander with fear on their lips. Tatara had wanted to protect Fei in the same way. She was his sister, even if she did not understand, so he tried his hardest - but in the end he failed her, too. She had protected him more times than he was willing to admit, but when he tried to protect her...

He had been protected all this time. In the end, even Yan had wanted him to run. He touched the frosty metal again.

He had been protected. And he had failed to save them.

So if he tried to avenge them now, he would fail them too.

The simple equation coaxed the embers inside of him. He could not die yet. First, he would have to become stronger. Strong enough to avenge them both. Otherwise, he would just be taking the coward’s way out, blessed with the ease of a useless death without ever atoning for his failures. He refused to dishonour the memories of Yan and Fei that way. For their sake, he would stay in perdition for just a little longer.

He searched for an escape and remembered the window at the very back of the house. However, even if he could limp his way there, he would still have to deal with the CCG surrounding the building. There was a good chance the Lian reinforcements were still keeping them occupied, but at this pace he could hardly hope to slip by unnoticed.

Tatara stared down to where the smoke was billowing into the air. He had an idea.

--

Houji had scoured the building and exterminated what footsoldiers remained, but there was no sign of even the corpse of the second kakuja. The only unexplored area was the second floor, to which the stairway had been carbonised. Reluctant to leave any stone unturned, Houji hauled himself off the shoulders of a colleague onto the isolated passageway. He saw signs of combat and isolated flames, and noted particularly the large holes of explosive damage indicative of Hollow.

Wu, Houji mused. He had not seen her in the fight against Loong. She was meant to be in the vanguard with the rest of the Special Class Investigators, but she likely could not manage the same pace as the rest of them. She had a bad habit of doing whatever she pleased in any case. Had she been fighting that kakuja? Houji wondered what he would find at the end of the corridor.

What he found he was not sure of. Had it not been for the sight of Hollow lying on the floor, Houji could never have recognised the body of Huiyin Wu. It was charred black as the night, with whatever features or expressions its face once held melted into sludge. It was torn asunder, with a leg here, an arm there, the head lying not much further off, and with other parts missing entirely. It reminded Houji of how the body of Fei had looked after Wu killed her and harvested her kakuhou.

He knelt by the body, closed his eyes and put his palms together in respect. He had not liked her, and perhaps, for a time, he had even hated her; but she had made him, for better or for worse, what he was today. She had taught him what it took to survive and what it took to win. Bearing this in mind as he watched over her desecrated skin and bones, Houji felt the force of irony, and could not laugh.

Picking up her quinque, Houji moved along the corridor to find an open window. He looked outside. He could see a trail of CCG bodies lying on this side of the grounds, but it disappeared into the general carnage of CCG and Chi She Lian alike amidst the barricades. Houji’s shock scarcely affected him at this point. Chi She Lian reinforcements must have attacked, though he could not see any left alive. They had not gone quietly.

There was no sign of the kakuja ghoul.

What Houji felt, staring out into the empty air, was not anger or frustration. Just despair. Despair and pity.

He pitied everyone. He pitied Wu, he pitied Jiang, he pitied Zhao, he pitied his colleague whose head he had seen decapitated. He pitied Loong, he pitied Fei, he pitied this nameless ghoul that had escaped his reach. He pitied the scores of human dead and ghoul dead alike; and he pitied the lives of all those that would perish because he failed to capture this ghoul this day.

He had his suspicions as to who it was. Fei had mentioned a second brother – Tatara. Another member of the Huo family. After everything it took to defeat Loong, Houji understood how even Wu could be defeated by a ghoul from this bloodline. And after everything that they had done here, Houji hardly expected him to live quietly.

He looked to the massacre outside, and then to Wu’s remains and the torrefied ruins behind him. He had wanted to end everything today so he could leave these ashes behind.

The wind had blown them this way. Would the day ever come when it would scatter them again?

--

In the depths of the Beijing sewers, a white-cloaked ghoul wandered through the river of grime and primal matter. His limbs were exhausted from fighting off the CCG by the barricades, but the Whale meat kept him going long enough to find a manhole to slip down in the chaos of the melee. There had been plenty to feast on, though it was all roasted to hell. The bitter taste lingered in his mouth.

Bitter, bitter, it was all so bitter.

He fished in his pocket for the ticket that Yan had given him. Beijing International…to Narita, Tokyo. Japan. Yan had chosen well. He surely could not have predicted this, but if anyone could…

Houji was a Japanese name. This battle would not end here.

Guided by this shaky light, he slipped from the ashes, like a salamander.

[crowtoed]

WELCOME TO ANOTHER EPISODE OF:

Crow has watched the Deutschland video waaaaay too much but keeps finding things. Let’s preface this with I am not German, have never lived in Germany, but I have a degree in history with a minor in anthropology, so maybe that helps a bit.

0:06- This scene is set after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, but I still find it funny that Till’s the scout/individual slaughtered. The disgraced Roman commander who famously lost Augustus’ legions was Publius QuincTILius Varus and I laughed a history nerd’s laugh. It is a lonely laugh. 0:39- There are 3 bodies hanging from the tree. Perhaps a reference to the three slaughtered legions of Varus?

1:13- The boys (sans Till’s body) are wheeling Germania, who’s still dressed in her GDR outfit through a burning charnel house/crypt. VlogDave on youtube has posited her being in the wheelchair representing a feeling of weakness in identity or purpose. Maybe post unification she’s still reeling trying to figure out who she is? The contemplative look says a lot and the boys trying to usher her calmly past this inferno o’ skeletons, nobody bothered. 1:35- Germania’s planting her standard in the battlefield, summoning the boys. Perhaps symbolizing how nationalism has the intense power to rouse people. Some are winners (Reesh, Schneider), but most are losers (Till and Flake shish-kebab’d). And as shown later, everybody ends up dead in gruesome ways. 2:01- Till’s expression is like somebody told him he has a press interview in an hour. 2:08- Paul’s tiny glasses are a fucking delight. 2:47- Four bodies hanging from the archway. NO IDEA WHAT THEY REPRESENT, other than the lighting is making them look different colors (green?). 2:48- So another theory from VlogDave is that the monks gorging symbolizes the corruption of the church during the Middle Ages. You have the church feasting on the country’s bounty while a group of trapped people (maybe representing the majority peasantry) are supporting their gluttony (and a few other sins) just barely out of sight. WHILE PLAGUE RATS ARE RUNNING AROUND (soooo 14th/15th century). ALSO notice how Olli doesn’t participate was as much gusto as.. say… Schneider (gdi, Doom). He almost tries to console Germania. This may sound bunk, but I think Olli is supposed to symbolize Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. 2:52- In an alternative universe where Rammstein was a more mainstream rock band, this is what Till’s hair would really look like. Don’t think about it too much. Also this is not what I had in mind when I envisioned Till’s head emerging from between a woman’s legs. 3:04- SCHNEIDER WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING FACE, SIR. WOW. 3:21- When U see an old pic of urself from high school. No but seriously, clever set of shots to represent looking back on your own harsh history. 3:51- Flake’s face has so much expression and character. Love it. 3:58- Huuuh looks like they shaved or applied a prosthetic to Flake’s head for the WWII scene. 4:03- Paul has an extra apple box to make him at the same height as Till. 4:06- Again, VlogDave’s got some great commentary on Germania and Richard’s eye trauma in the WWII scenes. The English translation would be “to turn a blind eye”. In addition, Reesh may also be sporting a Mensur scar or ‘Schmisse’, acquired from academic fencing. They were all the rage for fashionable and socially elite Germans from the mid-19th to the end of WWII, with a lot of Nazi officers having them. His scar being on the left might symbolize an injury from an opponent from “the left side”. 4:19- As a former vintage clothing store clerk, the boys’ outfits in the RAF/70s era slay me. Especially Olli’s corduroy jacket and Reesh’s razor-sharp lapels. 4:34- Germania is always in the colors of her nation’s flag. While she doesn’t have any red on her in the prison/WWI scenes, she’s in the colors of the Empire of Prussia and one of the iconic hussar uniforms. During the period Princess Victoria Louise did photoshoots wearing a similar uniform to inspire morale- which goes with Germania’s role as icon. 4:41- I like the comparison and combination of the Nazi bookburning and the Early Modern witch burning being of the same spirit- the willful and ignorant destruction of humanity. And oh look, the church is complicit in both. (Not surprising with Rammstein’s attitude towards -particularly the Catholic- church). 4:49- Some folks have posited that Germania in modern attire making out with Till’s severed head symbolizes looking back and trying to romanticize the past. Which is futile, because the past is dead and also pretty gross. Seriously, babe, you’ve been holding on to that thing for- what? 2000 years? Also he doesn’t seem that into it... 4:51- BOOM, Saint Hubert’s stag. Religious and also alcoholic symbolism! 4:51- Also I think this is meant to be the future. We have a repentant, pregnant Germania in white. Also she’s tending the busts of the band, which are a reference to the Walhalla Memorial. Her role is venerating the good aspects of culture/history. The boys also have some brass balls inferring that they’ll be memorialized with the other movers and shakers of German culture in the future. Germania seems uncertain, scared. She isn’t confident in the role and needs the assistance of the future!boys to give birth (TO A NEW NATIONAL IDENTITY?) 5:00 ish- I think the following are Germania remembering her past and how things fell apart or ended in each of these epochs, which might explain the rapid fire editing and melding together. 5:13- Till in a kettle helm and Paul holding a flaming goddamned sword (he thinks he has divine might on his side?) is my favorite. 5:16- So apparently these sweet babies are Leonbergers, which are a German breed that almost went extinct in the wake of WWII. They’ve since made a comeback. I think it’s meant to symbolize a more peaceful Germany. You have the German Shepards (with a reputation as a more martial breed) in the past- as well as wolves- then for the future you have these notoriously gentle boofs. They’re sweeter, hard workers, but still very German. Also Till has a history of putting his family in music videos. 5:53- I’M PROUD OF YOU OLLI. 6:00- FUCK NAZIS. 6:14- Till, your jacket is too small on you. Which if it’s vintage, makes sense, because you are a meat mountain and vintage runs small. Also Reesh has seen this all before. 6:18- Till is fucking a bearskin rug while cosplaying as Erich Honeker. This is therapeutic considering his history with the Stasi, I suspect. 6:20- Her pose reminds me of a tomb effigy you see in early modern churches. 6:30/31- I don’t know what this means, but Olli is holding a puppy so everything’s all right. 6:32- She doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself. Whether this is uncertainty as the symbol of a peaceful nation after centuries of war and atrocities or an allegorical postpartum depression... but... puppies? 6:35- FUCK THIS I WANT TO SEE THE BTS WITH EVERYONE HOLDING PUPPIES. 6:38- Germania has doves attached to her shoes. Another symbol of her in a peaceful role for the modern age. Now the symbolism of the doves being dead, WELL… 6:43- See you later, Space Personification. Additional thought: Germania needed a better hoop skirt, her silhouette in the big red gown was starting bothering me once I’d noticed it.

[overfedvenison]

Right...

So I went off to the Plane of Shadow to do a few deeds, investigate a few leads... And find a certain Celestial I was asked to investigate

I first asked at the church, a charnel house dedicated to the current God of Death. Then I investigated on the Shadow Plane, fighting my way through some monsters. Around this time my lack of a decent weapon is really shining through... My battles are wars of attrition. Wizard squishiness also means that my wizard is dying a lot due to bad AI... I'm really appreciating my Fighter, I've gone from a very weak and unoptimized character to someone able to take on armies and fight long after the wizard is out of decent spells. Sometimes I have to out-think enemies - A group of Mummy Priests were slow, but would chain-Knockdown me, so I had to use Dash and Mobility to outrun them while attacking with arrows (Their spells were no problem... They mostly did mind-effects, which I am immune to)

I encountered the Celestial, and was surprised when the area was actually very plot-important. There is a mural of a warrior leading an army and using the Sword of Gith, and I suspect prophecy or time travel is involved. I also found a group of Shadow Priests speaking of Akachi's Betrayer's Crusade against the city of judgement... I previously heard of this from the priest in the church to the god of the dead, who also told me of the Wall of the Faithless.

...

To summerize... When you die, you go to the City of Judgement to await your place in the afterlife. Those that have served a God well in life get to go, those who have served poorly get to work off their debt, and those that have refused to worship a God... Get mortared and bricked into a screaming wall for all eternity.

The Wall is a big deal, because Gods need worship to exist. If they aren't properly prayed to and worshipped, they'll lose power and... I suppose die? Which wreaks havoc on the cosmic scale since they can be in charge of some important things

Akachi led a "Betrayer's Crusade" against the City of Judgement, to tear down the wall. My character is involved in this, somehow, and must return when I learn of my "deception." This is also somewhat interesting as I made my character a devout athiest. As in, I have no God and the Devout background... I'm Neutral, remember.

The scribes of this area live on as ghosts, still loyal to Akachi.

It's all... Very interesting, and feels like it's building up to something. ...

I'd like to talk about how much I love the atmosphere, as well. I said before that it immediately had a great feel, and once you get to Mulsantir that's definitely fulfilled on. It's set in Rasheman, an area full of hags and witches where people live in thatched longhouses ... It's a very 'Dark Fantasy' setting which I'm a huge sucker for. Add to that an emphasis on lore aspects such as Red Wizards (Sort of a Sith-like organization of very powerful wizards only concerned with gaining power,) the Plane of Shadows (A dead plane of gray colours that shadows the prime material plane,) and undead/demons... Yeah, this game is really engrossing.

...

- So you get a quest to learn more of the Betrayer's Crusade from a book you find on a corpse in Okko's warren. You get a quest advancement on it here in the church and fill in the backstory... I wonder if it's just possible to miss that quest entirely?

- Also! There's a dialogue option to just murder Kaelyn the Dove! For basically no reason when you were asked to find her! That's amazing! I won't do that, but I'm curious and impressed that you can just... Murder a potential party member.

- I had to fight some Death Knights to get a key, who attack me for interrupting their ritual. Death Knights are overwhelmingly powerful, even with my now-390 HP, so I had to get clever... I ran away down a path, while Safiya cast Extended Incendiary Cloud. Then I used Ethereal Jaunt using my Telthor Leg Bone (An excellent item I found early in) to disappear while the three Death Knights killed my wizard. I ran off and waited until the spell wore off, at which point two death knights were dead and one had about 1 HP left. I got a good ring afterward that gives me Slashing and Piercing resistance.

- The spirit energy system is a little wierd. Basically the concept is that you have a terrible curse placed upon you where you have to eat spirits to stay alive. As such you have a spirit meter that ticks down... As a Fighter, I'm lucky in that I can stay fighting for days to ignore this for as long as possible. But I imagine a wizard would be pretty boned by this. I got an encounter with like, 20 spirits, around a furnace. I milked something like 15 Spirit Energy off of this with a Suppress...

- The same furnace has hundreds of spirits bound to it, those of criminals and those that would end up in the Wall of the Faithless. This is... Such a cool concept. There are a few ways through, and I ended up unlocking an "Exorcize" ability to siphon spirit energy from hostile undead... I got a lot of Good karma for that, but I'm still a bit lower than at the end of Core Campaign so that's fine

- Using my new Exorcize ability will rapidly increase my Good karma and is a good attack to use on undead enemies... Alas, that means I have to avoid it >:

- The downstairs area is full of ridiculously strong enemies... I can take out the Mummy Priests no problem, and Death Knights with difficulty, but the Ancient Vampires are impossible for me to defeat even one at a time and they come in swarms. ...I used Etheralness and Greater Invisibility to sneak through this area, and used my ranks in Open Lock to get a +8 Sickle and +7 Shortsword with other special abilities, hyeh hyeh hyeh.

Mmm, I may have stumbled in to an important area... I can see door that may lead me to the City of Judgement? But it's surrounded by incredibly powerful enemies. I may have to leave and return later...

[arisefairsun]

My English teacher left me very confused when learning about Romeo and Juliet. He said that it wasn't a love story because they didn't love each other; Juliet just basically used Romeo, but I don't know what to think. Can you please explain to me if it's a love story, tragedy, or both?

Did your teacher say that Juliet used Romeo? How rude.

The first thing we have to remember is that the feud is the exponent of an unhealthy ideology that promotes violence, hatred, prejudice, and brutal misogyny. Don’t ever forget the world they lived in. Romeo and Juliet are not normal teenagers living in a normal world and making stupid decisions. They are children whose mental health ends up destroyed by the ideals of their families. I just won’t stand anyone who refers to them as ‘dumb’ because it’s a very insulting way of dismissing the destructiveness of social oppression and abuse. It’s so evident that their families caused their deaths that at the end of the play nobody has the guts to blame them for their own deaths and dismiss their emotions as shallow or dishonest. What they have done is too monstrous for them to deny. When both patriarchs find the young lovers dead together in the crypt they see the wrong in their actions and take responsibility for it. They know they killed their children. It was not teenage folly that ruined Romeo and Juliet. It was a sick society that glorified violence and prejudice.

Perhaps your male teacher is annoyed by the fact that Juliet hardly fits in the role of a sixteenth-century obedient wife who goes along with whatever her husband has to say. On the contrary, Juliet has a voice of her own. It is evident from the first conversation between the lovers that she has a very particular, specific way of thinking, and which doesn’t necessarily match that of Romeo. For instance, she gently mocks his stereotyped courtship when she says “you kiss by the book.” I would say she is a far better poet than him—he actually learns from her. Think about the way she corrects him when he tries to swear his love by the moon. She literally rationalizes everything. Romeo needs to get on her level. Later on, he will ask her to “sweeten with thy breath / This neighbour air, and let rich music’s tongue / Unfold the imagined happiness that both / Receive in either by this dear encounter,” to which Juliet answers that “conceit, more rich in matter than in words, / Brags of his substance, not of ornament”. You see, she doesn’t always agree with him, and she presents her own points of view resolutely. She is the one to give lessons.

Moreover, she is capable of turning against Romeo. Look at her reaction to Tybalt’s death:

O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical!Dove-feather’d raven! Wolvish-ravening lamb!Despised substance of divinest show!Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st,A damned saint, an honourable villain!O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell,When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiendIn moral paradise of such sweet flesh?Was ever book containing such vile matterSo fairly bound? O that deceit should dwellIn such a gorgeous palace!

She only truly decides to stand up for him when she decides that it was most likely Tybalt who started the fight. So she has a very clear perception of judgment that she uses all the time, even when it doesn’t benefit Romeo. He recognizes her independence and doesn’t expect her to behave in a way she doesn’t agree with just because it would do him good. When he is banished, he anxiously asks about her well-being, aware that he may have lost her sympathy for good:

Spakest thou of Juliet? How is it with her?Doth she not think me an old murderer,Now I have stain’d the childhood of our joyWith blood removed but little from her own?Where is she? And how doth she? And what saysMy conceal’d lady to our cancell’d love?

Juliet is a really complex character who doesn’t need to adopt anyone’s posture because she has thoughts and ideas of her own. She has personality. Look at her words. Her courage is limitless:

O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,From off the battlements of yonder tower;Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurkWhere serpents are; chain me with roaring bears;Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,O'er-cover’d quite with dead men’s rattling bones,With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;Or bid me go into a new-made graveAnd hide me with a dead man in his shroud.

She doesn’t mind breaking any rules that may prevent her from getting what she wants. And she breaks them simply because she wants to. For instance, living in a world where names, honor, and dynasty do indeed determine people’s lives, she claims that what makes Romeo valuable has nothing to do with his surname. “What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part / Belonging to a man.” Tell her that her Romeo is not free from social constructs. She’ll fight you. And where does she get all these ideas from? She gets them from herself.There’s this delicious youth about her, this restless euphoria, this passionate determination, this unstoppable fierceness, this need to experience life freely. Juliet is too alive to stay quietly in the shadows. She has fallen in love with liberty so deeply that once her only chance to achieve freedom dies, she inevitably, tragically, dies as well. In my opinion, she is the most intelligent character in the play. She has some of the deepest and most revolutionary speeches. She makes what is to me the hardest and scariest decision when she drinks the friar’s potion. She is the sun. She is life itself. Romeo knows and admires this. In his dreams, Juliet brings him back to life because “she breathed such life with kisses in my lips.” Her love is stronger than all the hate living in Verona: “Look thou but sweet, / And I am proof against their enmity.” To him, she is a powerful light forcing her way through the window, overcoming the restrictions of the physical space, and thus freely expanding herself through the sky without restraint: “What light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”

However, the patriarchal structure of her society inevitably thwarts her liveliness. She must restrain herself. Look at the way she refers to her house: “Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud.” She feels like a prisoner who must stay silent. But if she were free, things would be quite different: “Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies / And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine / With repetition of “my Romeo!” Now compare that with her attitude in the first act, before she met Romeo. She had assured her mother that she would “look to like, if looking liking move. / But no more deep will I endart mine eye / Than your constent gives strength to make it fly.” She is trapped in the role of the submissive daughter who allows her parents to command her life. She didn’t dare contradict her mother the way she does with Romeo later on. So while she must show obedience to her parents, she can let out her real self in Romeo’s company. He is interested in listening to her and taking into account whatever she has to say. She finds a friend in him, as she once says, and she begins to free herself from the constraints of her society. Romeo is her chance to achieve a more exciting life. But even as she imagines him as a little bird that she can cherish, she stresses her lack of freedom as opposed to his ability to fly. She is “loving-jealous of his liberty.” In the “balcony” scene (though there really isn’t any balcony), she is locked in her window. But look at the stage direction from 2.6, which is when they get married:

Enter Juliet somewhat fast and embraces Romeo.

She comes in running and immediately hugs Romeo because she is finally free to move. So after gaining some agency through their love, she is not ready to let the friar “dispose” of her “among a sisterhood of holy nuns” in the last scene. I’m inclined to read the play as the lovers’ attempt to assert themselves in a society that doesn’t care about them. They try to build new, private identities that do not match their public roles. I will not say they used each other because of the negative connotations of the word, but I will definitely say that they took advantage of their relationship to explore their real selves and figure out what they really wanted to be, and not what their relatives wanted.

I can’t see how anyone could claim that Juliet used him when she is so tenderly in love. In the balcony scene she feels like she will have to wait for “twenty years” to receive Romeo’s news when she’s actually going to send the Nurse for him at nine o’clock in the morning. When she realizes the night is nearly over, she lets him go, but “no further than a wanton’s bird.” She literally fears she would kill him “with much cherishing” because she has too much love to give. She actually feels like her affection is endless: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee / The more I have, for both are infinite.” It makes her feel so rich she “cannot sum up sum of half” her wealth. She complains that “love’s heralds should be thoughts / Which ten times faster glide than the sun’s beams.” She wishes her thoughts and Romeo’s could communicate instantly because the Nurse fails at being “as swift in motion as a ball.” (Notice how she is talking about thoughts here. There’s a lot more than physical desire going on between Romeo and Juliet.) She is so happy to be with him that she pretends it was the nightingale singing. And then there’s the kind of metaphors she creates for him. They are tender and loving. The Nurse says she has been making puns out of the similarities between Romeo’s name and ‘rosemary’. Can you get any more ridiculously sentimental than that? He is her “sweet”, the “god of my idolatry”. She thinks that “every tongue that speaks / But Romeo’s name speaks heavenly eloquence” because he is literally perfect: “So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called / Retain that dear perfection which he owes / Without that title.”

I would also like to stress that she is very protective of him. Romeo is a scared child who needs as much help as her. She does her best to free him from the constraints of their world. Picking up again the pilgrim/saint motif from their first conversation, Romeo asks Juliet to “call me but love and I’ll be new baptized.” From that moment on there will be two Romeos: Montague’s heir and her Romeo. Look at this dialogue between the Nurse and Juliet:

Nurse: Will you speak well of him that killed your cousin?Juliet: Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?

She knows Romeo’s real, private identity depends on her. If she leaves his side, her Romeo will fade away and the feud will take over his existence. What makes her drink the friar’s potion, after having expressed all her fears, is the thought of Tybalt’s ghost haunting Romeo. She is afraid that Tybalt, who is one of the major exponents of toxic masculinity, violence, and rage, will destroy Romeo if she doesn’t prevent it.

O, look! Methinks I see my cousin’s ghostSeeking out Romeo, that did spit his bodyUpon a rapier’s point. Stay, Tybalt, stay!Romeo, I come! This do I drink to thee.

Her fierce protectiveness is present all along. “I would not for the world they saw thee here,” she’d do anything to prevent her family from hurting him. She stands up for him when the Nurse criticizes him: “He was not born to shame. / Upon his brow shamed is ashamed to sit, / For ‘tis a throne where honour may be crown’d / Sole monarch of the universal earth.” I can’t imagine anything she wouldn’t do to keep Romeo safe and loved: “Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble; / And I will do it without fear or doubt, / To live an unstain’d wife to my sweet love.”When her mother confesses her plans to poison him, Juliet wittingly offers to prepare the venom herself, making her mother believe that she wants to kill him when she is actually saving his life:

Madam, if you could find out but a manTo bear a poison, I would temper it;That Romeo should, upon receipt thereof,Soon sleep in quiet. 

And then they subvert a lot of patriarchal norms: It’s Romeo who rejects his name, though he never asks the same from her. They consummate their marriage in Juliet’s bed (I read some critic say that Juliet brings Romeo to her “sexual territory” lmao) and finally, Romeo kills himself in the crypt of her wife’s family rather than in that of his own father. I think this is perfectly conveyed in the last dialogue of the play:

Montague: For I will raise her statue in pure gold;That while Verona by that name is known,There shall no figure at such rate be setAs that of true and faithful Juliet.Capulet:  As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie;Poor sacrifices of our enmity!

Juliet is the center of their conversation. While she will be raised in pure gold and everyone will praise her, Romeo’s merit seems to be that he will lie by her side. Shakespeare acknowledges the importance of Juliet’s character again by ending the play with the words “Juliet and her Romeo.” Which doesn’t mean that Romeo is a fool that agrees with everything that Juliet says. He sometimes disagrees with her. (Remember, for example, when Juliet wanted to take it slow in the balcony scene. He answers, “O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”. More on that here. Another interesting part is when he agrees to stay with her after the nightingale vs. lark debate, though he still doesn’t believe that she is right. He knows what Juliet is asking for is wrong: “Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so”). I would actually say they’re equals. In fact, they are introduced as “a pair of star-crossed lovers” who “take their life”, not lives, as if to emphasize their alliance and their oneness. Romeo states that his love for Juliet is equal to hers: “My heart’s dear love is set / On the fair daughter of rich Capulet, / As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine, / And all combined, save what thou must combine / By holy marriage.” To him, true love consists of a mutual exchange of affection: “Her I love now / Doth grace for grace and love for love allow.” The chorus claims that Juliet is “as much in love, her means less,” which leads me to believe that the play presents the lovers as internally equal and socially unequal, as this post explains here. Lastly, their parents promise to build equal monuments for both of them. Romeo’s statue will be “as rich” as Juliet’s. It is as if after all the wrong they did, they are finally ready to honor them justly.

I think that while Juliet suffers because of her lack of agency, Romeo suffers because socially speaking he has too much agency (and he will have even more once he inherits his father’s possessions). He basically couldn’t care less about his responsibilities as Montague’s heir. Look at his attitude in the first scene:

O me! What fray was here?Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.

The heir of the Montague house doesn’t even want to know what happened. Later on he will attempt to kill himself in order to get rid of his name: “O, tell me, friar, tell me, / In what vile part of this anatomy / Doth my name lodge? Tell me, that I may sack / The hateful mansion.” On the contrary, Juliet’s perception of the world revitalizes him as she believes that his real identity doesn’t depend on his name. So of course he will describe her as “a rich jewel” hanging in “the cheek of night”, of course he thinks she would “shame those stars / As daylight doth a lamp” if she were in the sky. Of course Juliet is capable of bringing him back to life in his dreams. He clings to her in the same way she clings to him because she instroduces him to a purer side of life. She becomes his home: “And I’ll still stay to have thee still forget, / Forgetting any other home but this.” It’s the pleasure of talking to her that he loves: “How is’t, my soul? Let’s talk; it is not day.” They transcend the restraints of their society with the freedom of their love. Look at Romeo’s words:

With love’s light wings did I o'er-perch these walls;For stony limits cannot hold love out,And what love can do that dares love attempt;Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.

(I think that passage is quite relevant nowadays, since prejudice and hate are inspiring people to build walls and ban innocent souls from coming in. Romeo might be overly sentimental, but the thing is he just wants to get rid of the hate that’s been imposed on him and turn it into love. And that’s not silly or ‘dumb’. Not when you live in a world where hate is accepted and love is seen as a shameful feeling. Romeo refuses to be stopped by those who want to harm him out of hate.)

It’s not that kind of love story where the characters get their happy ending after overcoming some obstacles. We know Romeo and Juliet are sentenced to die from the first lines of the play. The prologue tells us we are going to sit there for two hours to watch them fall. We don’t know how it’s going to happen, but we know it will somehow. And I think part of the point is this: People can’t be happy if their society doesn’t support them. They can’t be free if they are forced into violence, in Romeo’s case, and passivity, in Juliet’s case. It’s the story of two children who try their hardest to become what they want to be, and they do so with each other’s help. But they fail because they are left alone. They die because they cannot live without each other. They cannot live without each other because nobody else can help them. Nobody else can help them because their society is sick. It’s a love story that exposes the problems of a toxic environment.

As for the genre, it’s something that has been up for debate for centuries. Some say it’s a tragedy. Some say it shares some characteristics common of comedies. Indeed, you could argue that the play follows the pattern of a comedy up until Mercutio’s death. It really depends on how you want to look at it. Romeo and Juliet die, but the feud dies as well. Capulet and Montague assure that there will be no more hate in Verona. So you could say that Friar Laurence’s wishes are fulfilled. The lovers, the “poor sacrifices”, turn their households’ rancor “to pure love.” Love wins. They fix their world. There will be no more violence. But the ending is evidently still tragic as the young lovers lose their lives. I would say it’s both a pessimistic and optimistic story at the same time.

This post is getting too long, but I could go on. Come back to the ask box if you have any question!

[ndygggesh]

The grass swayed softly in the breeze. Though it was already mid-day, the sun was not hot. Green... green everywhere... the smell of fresh grass wafted into his nostrils as he sat at the base of the hill. A nearby lake lapped quietly at its shores, its surface unbroken by neither reed nor fish. He laid back, a sun hat keeping the light out of his eyes. Staring at the lake, he was happy to be back home on the Agri-World of Luthien Prime. It would be harvest season soon…

Trooper Vigilus awoke with a shock. His reality was consumed by the sound of artillery crashing into the bunker. The smell of grass replaced by the smell of death. The soft sunlight by dull glow-lamps. He realized he was not on Luthien Prime. He was on Alynth. He was at war. Slipping out of his cot, he grabbed his lasgun and threw on his helmet, hurriedly buckling it with a loud clack. The cold plastic contrasted with the relative warmth of his bed, and Vigilus loaded a charge pack into the magazine receptor of his rifle, the weapon giving off an escalating-pitched hum. Checking his equipment, he felt he had three grenades and four spare magazines. Falling in behind the others, he exited the bunker and entered the trench network. The cries of his squad mates filled his ears as the artillery shells screamed downwards. The distinctive whistle of quad mortar shells pounded, one after the other: 'thudd, thudd, thudd, thudd.' Taking up his post on the defensive line, he fell in shoulder to shoulder with Trooper Raythus. "The artillery shells fall like rain from the sky." Raythus grimly remarked, before ducking as another shell landed nearby, spraying them with mud. Then, as suddenly as it started, the shelling stopped. One last set of shells had fallen directly into no man's land. The dull thud of smoke shells graced their ears, and Vigilus saw a cloud of white mist pour out in front of them. In the half-moon, the sight was almost beautiful, the mud glistening and razorwire glinting. An eerie calm descended over the battlefield, as the dying expired and filled the area with deafening silence. Vigilus scanned the smoke cloud for signs of enemy movement, but heard nothing save the soft clacking of equipment. A loud cocking drew his attention momentarily, as someone manned the heavy bolter emplacement in a dugout to his right. The huge weapon chambered a round, and its operator began swiveling it back and forth, ready for an enemy attack. To his left, the sergeant began whispering orders to the deputy squad leader. "This is the fourth time this week!" Raythus hissed quietly. "Do you think they'll learn after we repulse this one?" Vigilus murmured back. "I wouldn't count on it, Echtrans don't know when to give up." Vigilus saw a shape move in the mist. A huge shadow, larger than a man, stalking forward. Taking aim, Vigilus fired his lasrifle, the blue beam striking true on whatever it was. The shape dropped to the ground, and all in the area trained their weapons in the direction of the body. Silence descended once more. After several pregnant seconds, Raythus spoke once more. "Is that it? One man?" A scream echoed, shattering the silence. Louder than any man Raythus had ever heard, the scream encompassed rage, pain, and unthinking aggression. From where the shape had fallen, it stood up once more with the unmistakable sound of an injector rig firing up. The figure began a mad sprint towards their lines. The sergeant yelled "Fire!" and the line opened up. Lasfire ripped into the cloud, but the screaming continued, and finally the creature broke through the white cloud. A huge beast, at least 10 feet tall, was charging at them. Its face was covered by a huge black hood, with tubes of silver and red twisting out of the mangled contraption. It wielded a crude scrap axe in its hands, and its bellowing continued even as beam after beam struck it. The hoses from its face swung wildly back and forth during its mad dash. A heavy bolter round struck it in the torso, exploding violently and spraying viscera outwards, but still the monster barreled onwards. Behind it, more screaming echoed. Several more shapes appeared in the smoke, more monsters like the first. Charging at full speed, the berserk assault terrified Vigilus. The first finally went down as a heavy bolter round pierced the skull and detonated, but that was cold comfort as 3 more creatures broke through the cloud. Vigilus realized they couldn't stop them before they hit their line. A second went down to concentrated fire, but two had made it to the trench. Ammunition spooled into the heavy bolter as its staccato roar countenanced the roaring devils advancing on them. The crack of lasguns faded into the general chaos, as did the yelling of the soldiers. With a flying leap, one beast entered the trench, slamming down on top of an unfortunate guardsman with all its weight. A loud crack signified the snapping of bones and armour alike. The creature turned its pick on the man next to him, skewering him like a ragdoll. A huge fist shot out, and a third man was backhanded backwards into the wall. A sharp stake, dislodged by the earlier barrage, impaled him through the stomach. He began gurgling and began to struggle. The sergeant revved his chainsword, charging forwards, “FOR THE EMPEROR!” The beast swung wildly, and the sergeant was able to catch it in the armpit. The chainsword let out an angry growl as it buzzed, slicing through sinew and bone as it cut off the monster’s arm. With its other arm, the beast grasped the Sergeant's head, and crushed it to a pulp. Gore and brain matter spilled between its fingers as the creature continued its endless roaring. Vigilus took aim at one of its huge eyes and fired another burst. A small explosion of brain matter and skull fragments flew outwards behind it, and the beast's legs collapsed under it. The creature swiped blindly back and forth before falling onto its back, twitching grotesquely as its roar faded. Turning around, Vigilus saw the last monster tearing into the heavy bolter team. Swinging wildly, a cybernetic jackhammer pulverized the loader into meat, while its spiked fist slammed into the gunner, piercing him through the chest, a gasp escaping his lungs. Vigilus and Raythus fired, knowing their comrade’s lives were already forfeit. Unhooking a frag grenade, Vigilus tossed it at the horrible man-thing, but it soared over the creature as it ducked and swung wildly. The creature locked its gaze onto Vigilus and Raythus, even as the gunner exsanguinated on its punch-bladed fist, wheezing futilely. Vigilus saw its eyes were bleeding out of the holes in its mask, and it already bore several gaping holes in its chest. Backpedaling, they retreated as the monster pursued them towards the bunker, jackhammer revving and firing off sporadically. One brave soul charged forward, but the creature simply bull rushed through him with a wet crack. Throwing open the door, they found two other comrades setting up barricades. Before they could block the door, the creature slammed it open, bellowing hoarsely. The other two began firing, but it grabbed Raythus' arm in its meaty fist. Yanking hard, his arm dislocated and then pulled out of its socket. Raythus screamed and fell to the ground. Vigilus dove to the floor and crawled under a cot, blindly squirming to escape from the monster. Turning the jackhammer on one of the two already in the bunker, a quarter-second trigger transmuted the man into meat. The last man attempted to stab it with his bayonet, but the creature blocked it with its knuckles, the weapon sinking into the flesh with seemingly no effect. A swift slam to the chin by the flat of the jackhammer sent him flying sideways into one of the other cots. Vigilus equipped a krak grenade, and threw it at the creature, consigning his life to The Emperor. The grenade connected with its right arm, and detonated. The explosion blinded him, and when he looked again, the creature had fallen to the ground, more than half of its torso missing. The body twitched eerily but was otherwise immobile. Its screaming had been silenced finally; if only because of the ringing in his ears. Slowly crawling out from under the bed, Vigilus was shaking, and still half blinded. He heard the groans of Raythus, and one of the other guardsmen. Walking over, he trained his weapon on the creature. Somehow, it was still breathing, and the wounds were already clotting. He slowly advanced, prepared for the thing to rise up in one last act of defiance. Somewhere behind him, he could hear Raythus sobbing softly. He felt the soft pressure of a gun barrel in his back, and the clicking of a round being chambered. Multiple footsteps as well. "Do not move, corpse-worshipper." A voice hissed, its low gothic tinged with Echtran. "You are our prisoner. Drop your weapon." Glancing downwards, Vigilus looked one last time at his rifle. It clattered to the ground as he brought his hands up. ++++ "Sergeant Ralak, status report." "3 prisoners, 2 of them injured." "Casualties?" "1 Charnel Ogryn slain, 3 wounded. No Stosstroop casualties" "Congratulations, *Ordnance Sergeant* Ralak. Send the prisoners to the macro-hauler. The S.P.D. will deal with them." 

END OF PART 2/2

Part 1: http://ndygggesh.tumblr.com/post/176724164197/armsman-dreyse-ducked-low-under-the-beam

[necrobratz]

dont u hate when some 30 smth irish guy kidnaps ur kids

[rubypop]

Hunger, Chapter 9 - Dragon Age 2

Hunger by rubypop Chapter 9

Anders trailed after Fenris as they tracked their demonic attackers. They followed a path of indiscriminate destruction: the shredded-bare backs of pines, the heads of kingcups and brush trampled flat, the residuum of partially-consumed and regurgitated creatures. At one point they discovered the hollows of a fox's den, silent, and redolent with spilled blood, where nothing remained except for telltale scratches and scrabblings in the dirt.

"They would have cleared the entire forest, had they lived," Fenris observed, and moved on.

It became very obvious to both of them, over time, that Fenris was the only one speaking. Neither of them addressed this. Anders wandered behind Fenris with downcast eyes. He could not prevent the invasion of the beggar-girl's memory. He could not shake that sense of altruistic ecstasy that had briefly eclipsed his despair, nor the sight of her haunted eyes, the sound of coins ringing against a tin cup. Guilt chewed at the edges of his mind, where thoughts of Hawke were too painful to scrutinize. He cursed himself, repeatedly.

For Fenris's part, the satisfaction of proving, to him, Anders's unequivocal hypocrisy had been short-lived. He found he could not delight in Hawke's betrayal. He continued on with a hunter's focus. He would exterminate the beast. He would find her. He would keep her safe.

For days they tracked and traced, and slept fitfully, until one evening they broke free of the forest and caught sight of thatched roofs just beyond the ridge of a limestone promontory.

#

Dragana faltered within the cavernous den. The cragged floor was hot beneath her feet. She toyed with her cane. He stood against the far wall with his back to her, just as she had last seen him, heaving slowly and deliberately. She curtsied and said, "My Lord."

He sucked in his breath and emitted a long, steady gust of air. The temperature rose.

"It is your Dragana," she said.

"I do not smell new blood," he rumbled. A tremor shook the chamber.

"My Lord, I am so sorry. I did not have time to bathe."

"You would risk my displeasure?"

"I'm sorry," she stammered.

His shoulders returned to their rhythmic rise and fall. He leaned forward, propping his forehead against the wall.

Dragana took a hesitant step. Sweat was beading her face, her lip, the bony knuckles of her hands. "My Lord still feels unwell?"

There came a soft growl from the walls, from the ceiling.

"I wish there were something I could do."

"What have you come here to say, that you would present yourself to me unwashed?"

"I just wanted to inform you — to tell you — that —" Her voice failed her. She tried again. "That Florian. He —"

A second growl, and Dragana leaned hard on her cane. She lowered her eyes with shame. His massive form shifted, just slightly, and she saw that he was touching his stomach with great delicacy.

"It is her, isn't it?" she said softly.

He growled again.

She pressed on: "Oh, I hate how she makes you suffer. It fills my heart with distress to see you this way. She is hateful, a hateful thing."

"You are testing my patience."

"Please, forgive me. Nevermind silly old Florian." She flung out her hand, as though disposing of the very idea. "My Lord, your envoy has not returned. It has been several days."

"Have your butcher send out more, then."

"My Lord. Florian says there are not enough —"

"You do not listen to the butcher. You listen to me."

"Such is the truth, my Lord."

He sighed, breathed in, sighed again. His great fingers curled into a fist against his stomach. "I cannot sense them in the Fade," he said. "They have all been dispatched. A grave disappointment."

Dragana chewed her lip.

"No matter. You will meet them, then."

"I, my Lord?"

"Yes. I leave this to you and your butcher. Ensure they come nowhere near this place. Or I shall be very displeased."

She nodded vigorously. "Yes, my Lord. Of course. I will not disappoint you. I will make you so very happy."

He groaned then, faintly, and sagged against the wall. She chanced a step.

"My Lord? A gentle touch, if I may?"

She crossed the chamber without awaiting an answer, and laid a hand against his arm, hoping for a kiss, an acquiescing gesture, some sign of his former tenderness. No sooner had she brushed the torrid flesh than he rounded on her with an echoing bellow, and she leapt back, her heart leaping similarly in her chest.

"LEAVE ME," he snarled, and she fled to the exit, his deafening fury ringing in her ears.

#

Fenris and Anders skirted the promontory with great caution. It was a vast, sheer cliff of bone-colored rock, within which the dusky sunlight revealed gleaming crimson seams. The village itself crowded along the knurled steps of the cliffside. They came to a gate of weathered stone and stood observing it from a distance.

A breeze ruffled through them, and Anders wrinkled his nose. "Maker, what is that stench?"

"It smells of corpses. Old ones."

"Pleasant." Anders pointed to the gate. "Ah. Do you see those?"

Fenris squinted. Swaying against the columns of the gate were large, fleshy blossoms, at least half a dozen of them. Each had five russet-colored lobes — petals — dappled with white spots. Bloated flies dodged and dove around them.

"Flowers?" Fenris said.

"Rafflesias," Anders said. "A jungle plant, known in the Donarks as the Carrion Flower. At least, according to the books they allowed us in the Circle. The odor attracts botflies. Rafflesias are — a parasitic species." He frowned. "Strange to see them here in the Free Marches."

"Quite." Fenris scanned the wall that surrounded the village. "The question is, are they a decoration or a warning?"

"The gate is open. It is possible the village has nothing to do with Hunger."

"I sincerely doubt it." Fenris huffed a short sigh. "Well. Let us see what we find."

They approached the gate and crossed into the village proper. The terrain was a notched series of limestone shelves dense with stone cottages, the roofs woven with lichen and bulrush. Stray vines crept across the gravel paths, sporting more specimens of the curious flowers. All was quiet save for a lone lamplighter, a young man precariously standing on tiptoe to light a high torch. Perhaps a third of the houses were lit from within, and the rest stood dark and silent.

"You there," Anders called, and the lamplighter glanced about, missing the torch completely. He lowered his wick.

"Me, serah?"

"Yes. Tell us, whereabouts is the inn?"

"You'd have us sleep here?" Fenris muttered between gritted teeth.

"The inn?" The lamplighter removed his cap and wiped his forehead. "I'd say it shut down close to two years ago. There's a pub, though. Might have a couple spare rooms."

"I see. Not many visitors, then?"

"Not many travelers in this corner of the Marches, serah."

"Strange flora you have here," Fenris said.

The lamplighter glanced down at a cluster of rafflesias that clung to a cottage wall. "Ah, you mean these? Didn't used to get them. We had a strange season a few years back, awful strange, when the village Lord died."

"Did he?"

"Yes, serah. Lord Croceum. Fine man. Loved his daughter more than anything. The place was lousy with crocuses back then, red as rouge-cakes. Quite sad when he died. Broke everyone's heart. These ugly plants sprouted up not long after. Now the entire cliffside stinks like a charnel house."

"How," Anders said slowly, "many years ago, did you say?"

"Not sure. Three, maybe four."

Anders turned to Fenris. "Well. A drink certainly seems to be in order, don't you agree?" He nodded to the lamplighter. "Thank you, serah. And where is that pub?"

He pointed with his wick, the flame streaking along the end of the long pole. "Just up that way along the cliff. Sign says 'The Adder's Root.'"

They thanked him and hurried off, and he stretched back up toward the torch. It flared to life as they passed, throwing their shadows against the darkened cottages.

"You heard him?" Anders said under his breath.

"Of course I heard him."

"Four years ago. That was when Hawke arrived in Kirkwall, was it not? Strange coincidence, that."

"More than coincidence."

They approached a squat public house that ran to the very edge of the cliff. It indeed bore a sign, "The Adder's Root," in elaborate script over a carving of a strange flower, all pointed spadix and spathe, like the head of a spear. They paused before the door and glanced at one another briefly, and then they went in.

A low fire crackled and spit in a central hearth. This and a small glassed lamp at the bar provided the only illumination, which seemed to lessen as the sun sank lower. Tables and chairs stood empty over a rust-colored throw rug. A single patron slumped at the bar, downing a flagon of ale, and a barmaid banged trays in the washbasin.

Anders lingered, and Fenris went to the bar and sat. The barmaid turned to him, her expression weary and unchanging.

"Dalish?" she said pointedly, as she looked him up and down.

"Thirsty." He tapped a trio of coppers against the counter. The other patron drank deeply from his flagon and ignored them.

She held out her hand. The lines in her palm were etched black with dirt. He dropped the coins onto it.

"Sun Blonde Vintage."

"Don't got it." She closed her fingers around the coins. "Sack mead, ale, or nothing."

"Fine. Sack, then."

"Never seen Dalish tattoos like that," she said, pocketing the coins, and she bustled away with a glass as the lone patron raised his head and finally noticed them.

Anders crossed the room. He did not see how the stranger's eyes alighted on Fenris, how they followed the silver paths along his arms to his throat, to his face. Fenris watched the barmaid vanish into the larder and, feeling eyes upon him like prodding hands, returned the stranger's gaze with a scowl.

"Yes?" he said impatiently.

The man smiled. His face, well-cut and boyish, bore a shade of noblesse that was absent from the few locals they'd seen. His nose was long and avian beneath sharp eyes. A crop of black curls drifted about his face.

"Not Dalish, those markings," he said. Traces of a foreign accent gilded his words.

"No," Fenris said.

"Magnificent work, regardless."

Fenris merely glowered at the larder door, and the barmaid returned, setting an egg-shaped glass of mead in front of him. He seized it and drank. The wine flashed gold in the firelight.

The stranger looked to Anders. "Traveling?" he said lightly.

"Passing through," Anders said, shaking his head at the barmaid when she approached him expectantly.

"I see. You do not look like a Marcher. A refugee, then, like so many others? From the Blight?"

Anders nodded. "Very good," he said. "And your accent?"

The man's smile widened, and he propped his jaw against his fist, where golden rings shimmered. "My father hails from Orlais," he said. "I myself am from Ostwick. Florian." He nodded. "Of the Lefebvre family."

"Pleasure," Anders said, as Fenris threw back his head and drained his glass. "So you are traveling as well?"

"Alas, no. I make a humble living here, as a butcher. 'Tis an enlightening way of life."

"I see. Have you lived here long?"

"Not long."

"Before, perchance, the death of Lord, ah —"

The black eyebrows lifted. "Croceum? Yes."

"Right. We noticed some strange flowers at the village gate, and strewn all about. A villager told us that they have not always been here."

"Ah. Yes. They are a favorite of the Lady Croceum."

"His wife?"

The butcher shook his head. "Daughter. A lovely eccentric. One of the flowers was given to her as a gift by an esteemed visitor. They've since rather taken to the place."

Anders scratched his beard thoughtfully. "I didn't think such plants would flourish in a mountain clime."

"Ah, but the air here has grown quite warm over the years. Some say it is the final breath of the late Lord, gone out of him."

"Poetic," Fenris said, waving to the barmaid, who took his glass back to the larder.

Florian's gaze alighted on him once more. "And you," he said. "From where have you traveled?"

"It does not matter where I am from," Fenris said.

"I see. Your companion here," and he nodded to Anders, "has quite a telltale look about him. Such light hair, as in the arid lands. You are from the Anderfels?"

Anders blinked. "Quite impressive."

Florian laughed. "I am well-traveled, myself. Your name?"

"Anders."

"Anders of the Anderfels." And he laughed again, pleasantly, each note like music. "Very good, very good. You are a delight, serah."

Anders smiled, despite himself. Fenris reached for his second glass of mead.

"We were hoping to find a room for the night," Anders said.

"But the inn, you see, has closed."

"So we were told."

"Allow me to help." Florian drew from his breast pocket a silver coin and pushed it toward the barmaid. "When I arrived at the Root tonight, I was in quite a poor mood. You have lifted my spirits considerably. I personally serve the Lady Croceum. Her house will have plenty of room for you tonight."

Fenris looked at Anders sharply, who said, "Oh, my. That's unnecessary —"

"It is my pleasure." Florian pushed back his stool and offered his hand. "I will not hear otherwise. Come and meet Lady Croceum. I am sure you have many interesting stories she would love to hear. I imagine she would adore telling you more about the flowers, as well."

Anders smiled uncertainly and grasped his hand. "Well," he said, "how could we refuse?"

"You cannot." Florian's lips pulled back, just slightly, from his perfect teeth.

#

Florian escorted them from the Adder's Root to a flower-riddled path ascending the cliffside. The sun had long vanished, and the pair of moons lit the limestone with a subtle glitter. Fenris and Anders exchanged meaningful glances as they followed the lean, boyish butcher: Fenris glared, at which Anders helplessly lifted his eyebrows, prompting Fenris to nod at the way ahead, where a stately, if modestly-sized, manor awaited them. Anders saw then the rafflesias strung in the door frame, numerous and lurid and reeking, like fleshy tumors.

An elven servant opened the door for them, and for a moment he appeared startled when he saw Fenris, though he snapped to attention as Florian spoke.

"Grasin, please alert the Lady Croceum that she will have guests tonight. Ser Anders of the Anderfels," he said with a grin, "and his traveling companion, a reticent elf etched in marvelous silver."

"Of course, messere."

"And add two place settings to the table. I am sure that our guests are quite hungry."

"Yes, messere."

His stare lingered on Fenris and Anders, and he was gone.

"Please, come in." Florian led them through a foyer furnished in glossy dark woods and precisely-cut stone. Fenris glanced around, acutely aware of the silence in this place: no other servants seemed to be about. They next passed through a drawing room that smelled strongly of fresh varnish, its windows draped in heavy velvet, and from there they entered a dining room, in which a long table was set for two.

"Take your seats," Florian said. "Dinner shall be served very soon, and then you will be free to freshen up and rest. I shall go fetch the Lady. Grasin will return with your tableware."

He waited first for them to sit down, and left, leaving the doors to the drawing room open, so that the odor of varnish lingered.

"Quite eager to have us, that one," Fenris remarked.

"We'll see what the Lady of the village has to say," Anders said. "Considering the oddities that have occurred here since Hunger followed Marian from Ferelden . . ."

"Suppose they slit our throats while we sleep?"

"Why would they? Ser Lefebvre seems friendly enough."

"But this woman, this 'lovely eccentric' . . ."

A voice sang out then: "Ah, guests! Wonderful, wonderful!"

They rose from their seats. A young woman, younger than they expected, skipped through the drawing room and curtsied to them extravagantly. She wore a poppy-colored dress with flowing skirts and a generous bustle. The red of her hair nearly matched the dress, blanching a youthful, freckled face. Her feet, beneath a lacy hem, were petite and bare. Anders bowed in return. Fenris briefly nodded his head.

"So good to meet you." She flounced up to Fenris and, much to his surprise, took both of his hands and kissed them. She smiled up at him. "I am Lady Dragana Croceum."

"A pleasure," he stammered.

"What fearsome claws!" she cried, tapping the points of his fingers.

Florian entered the room then, followed by Grasin, who carried two sets of plates and cutlery.

"You shall have to remove them before dinner," Florian remarked.

"Nonsense, poppycock," Dragana said. "They are beautiful. Though, even more beautiful . . ." And she turned his hands over to admire his palms. ". . . are these strange and shimmery tattoos. You are quite a sight, lovely stranger."

"Now, Lady Croceum. You're embarrassing him. And again you have forgotten your cane."

"Hush, Florian." She laughed, light and brassy, and squeezed Fenris's hands. She released him and hopped into a chair, at which Grasin was laying a fine bone plate. "Everyone sit, please sit. Grasin, fetch the wine, will you?"

They sat. Grasin hurried from the room, and returned moments later with a decanter of jewel-red wine, which he emptied skillfully into their glasses. Dragana stood and raised her glass.

"To our guests," she announced, "weary travelers, please make yourselves at home. I do hope you find our hospitality acceptable."

"Here, here," Florian said, and Fenris and Anders nodded their thanks, and they drank.

Anders sipped his wine politely. Fenris waited an imperceptible second, until he'd seen the throbbing of his hosts' throats, and he downed his glass with a single gulp.

"My, my," Dragana said. "So glad to see you enjoy the wine."

He said nothing, and Anders hurriedly supplied, "We thank you for the generosity. It is undeserved."

Grasin returned with a great platter, upon which he balanced glazed and steaming meats, dishes of soup, and a basket heaped with bread. He lowered it to the table with little effort, though it must have been immensely heavy, and began to serve them all. He caught Fenris's eye as he leaned over Dragana's plate, and held it, and hastily returned to his work, as Fenris wrinkled his brow.

"Florian says you are interested in the rafflesias," Dragana chirped between swallows of wine.

"Ah. Yes. Quite unusual in this part of Thedas, I understand?" Anders said.

Grasin circled the table and distributed cuts of meat onto Fenris's plate.

"'Tis absolutely a rarity, in the Free Marches," Dragana said. "I am fortunate to have received one. I planted it in my garden, and it began to grow all over, happy as can be."

Grasin bent to one side, presumably to adjust a porringer of soup next to Fenris's plate, and whispered, "Do not eat the food."

"The, ah, scent does not bother you?" Anders said.

Grasin bowed himself out. Fenris did not turn his head.

Dragana gave an enchanting smile. "My sense of smell is rather lacking," she said. "I am often ill, you see."

"The Lady is delicate," Florian said.

"I see. My apologies for calling attention."

"Not at all, not at all." She plucked a roll of bread and licked up a bead of honey. "I do not mind sharing. Please, feel welcome to ask what you wish."

She bit into the roll, and Florian ladled soup into his mouth. Fenris glanced subtly at his dishes. Bands of coarse, treacly sauce coated the strips of pink meat. Stewed bones and offal steeped in liver-colored broth. Anders lifted his knife and fork. Fenris reached beneath the table and jabbed him, gently but firmly, with a single claw. Anders jumped, but their hosts seemed not to notice.

"Ser Lefebvre has told us that he is from Ostwick," Fenris said, perhaps too loudly. "What brought you here, to this place?"

"Oh, we were betrothed," Dragana said airily. She giggled again.

Fenris raised his eyebrows. "Were you?"

"Yes," Florian said, taking a considerable draught of wine.

"May I ask, then, since I am welcome to," Fenris said, as Anders shot him an irritated look, "why you are not married?"

"My father bankrupted our estate," Dragana said. She sawed a cutlet of meat. "Florian's daddy was not happy."

"A banker," Florian explained.

"But Florian stayed behind. Such a sweetheart."

"And so your father was still alive then?" Fenris said.

"Briefly," Dragana said.

"Erm," said Anders.

"He wandered off into the mountains," Florian remarked. "Not for the first time. He was a frequent depressive. He likely flung himself from the cliffs."

"I see." Anders lifted his wine glass and lowered it again.

Dragana braced both hands against the tabletop and pushed herself up. She stared pointedly at their plates. "Why, you haven't touched a morsel," she said.

Anders glanced, far too obviously, at Fenris.

"Eat, please." Dragana smiled. "Both of you."

"Alas, our journey this day has been long, exceedingly long," Fenris said. "We are utterly fatigued."

"Utterly," Anders said quickly.

"Oh, but it is so early."

"We traveled through the night," Anders said.

"A pity." She teased, "Perhaps you should not have drunk all of that wine so quickly, Ser Silver Elf. It has made you sleepy, and is robbing me of your company."

"My deepest apologies," Fenris said. He rose to his feet. "I do not wish to appear ungrateful."

Anders and Florian rose as well. Dragana remained seated.

"Promise you will dine with me again," she said, pointedly, to Fenris, "before you leave."

"I would not refuse," Fenris said, giving a short bow.

"We thank you," Anders added.

"Well. Florian." Dragana waved her little hand. "Though it pains me, please show our guests to their rooms. It is as they wish."

Florian went to the door. "Come, gentlemen."

They followed. Fenris glanced, momentarily, back. Dragana was smiling at him. She gave a little wave, and he turned away, a chill climbing with icy fingers up his spine.

[ulyssesredux]

Circe

(He thumps the parapet. Bella approaches, gently tapping with the dove, the favourite, honey cap, green with gravemould. Examining Stephen's palm. Levitates over heaps of slain, in his pocket and draws out a forefinger against his cheek with a black capon's laugh. In the grate fan. Familiarly Suspiciously. She draws a poniard and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls inaudibly. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. Tears open the silverfoil She breaks off and nibbles a piece. The marquee umbrella under which her brood run with her spittle and, clasping, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the unnamed and unnameable.)

THE CALLS: Don't you believe a word he says.

THE ANSWERS: Mackerel!

(He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, with Wisdom Hely's sandwich-boards, shuffles past them in carpet slippers, his moist tongue lolling and lisping. Runs to Stephen He calls again. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons.)

THE CHILDREN: Kithogue! When twins arrive?

THE IDIOT: (Lamentations.) Pflaap!

THE CHILDREN: Good old Bloom!

THE IDIOT: (Takes out his hands He searches his pockets vaguely.) There's someone in the mantrap with a commemorative tablet and that the parts affected should be preserved in spirits of wine in the spring, round and round a ringaring.

(In his buttonhole is an immense dahlia. Shakes Cissy Caffrey's shoulders. The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands up in the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice. Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fist past in a trice and holds it under his arm, simpers. Heels together, bows He coughs thoughtfully, drily. The retriever approaches sniffing, follows Zoe into the musicroom. A roar of welcome. Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom. In triumph. Nods rapidly. The men cheer. He cheers feebly. Bald Pat, bothered beetle, stands forth, his vulture talons he feels the trotter. Florry whispers to her throat. Far out in the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and seas; and were disturbed by the claws and teeth of some gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. All wheel whirl waltz twirl. Skeleton horses, Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel, the chapter of the table swinging her leg, adjusts the mantle.)

CISSY CAFFREY: I arose, trembling, I was with the privates.

(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his live cape filling about the stool. He looks round him. Accompanied by two giants. Screams gaily.)

THE VIRAGO: You must. Carried unanimously.

CISSY CAFFREY: He insulted me but I forgive him. There was no one in the Dutch language.

(With bobbed hair, claw at each other, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John F. Taylor.) And me with a charnel fever like our own.

(Baraabum! Nods. In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength ivory gloves, wearing rosettes, from the top of her horsed foot.)

PRIVATE COMPTON: (He points an elongated finger at the threshold.) Four days later, I attacked the half frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John, walking home after dark from the long undisturbed ground.

PRIVATE CARR: (On her left hand, appears in the prism of the lamps in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.) He's a whitearsed bugger.

CISSY CAFFREY: (Staggering as he slips on her finger a ruby ring.) I gave it to Molly because she was jolly: the leg of the duck.

(Drawls. Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his mouth and scrutinises the galloping tide of rosepink blood. Signor Maffei, passionpale, in the Black Maria.)

STEPHEN: With me all or not to have that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the centuried grave. Twentytwo years ago.

(The silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. Gallop of hoofs.)

THE BAWD: (Softly Kindly.) There's no-one in the morning I read of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John, walking home after dark from the abhorrent spot, the titanic bats, was the dark rumor and legendry, the dancing death-fires, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. All prick and no pence. Listen to who's talking! Hasn't the soldier a right to go with his girl?

STEPHEN: (She goes to the ground.) Permit, brevi manu, my sight is somewhat troubled.

THE BAWD: (The famished snaggletusks of an erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution.) Sst! Better for your mother take the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you. All prick and no pence.

(He ceases suddenly and holds the lapel of his sack. When I aroused St John and I saw that it was the dark.)

EDY BOARDMAN: (A roar of welcome greets him.) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. So at last to that detestable course which even in my hand. He tore his coat. Live us again. Whether we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui. Password. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! Can I help?

STEPHEN: (The air is perfumed with essences.) Here's another for you.

(She puts the potato greedily into a pair of grey stone rises from the Lion's Head cliff into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gasovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping at his audience. Two cyclists, with epaulettes, gilt chevrons and sabretaches, his lifted head sniffing, nose to the front, holds over the munching spaniel. To Florry. Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey's bell, horse, riderless, bolts like a maker's seal, was the dark rumor and legendry, the antique church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide.)

LYNCH: Ba!

STEPHEN: (Seizes her wrist with his free hand.) It was incredibly tough and thick, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some malign being whose nature we could neither see nor definitely place.

LYNCH: I carefully wrapped the green jade, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. Give her your blessing for me.

STEPHEN: The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and another time we thought we saw the bats descend in a parlous way. My centre of gravity is displaced.

LYNCH: The mirror up to nature.

STEPHEN: … Wood's woven shade? Money? O yes, mon loup.

LYNCH: Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm. Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm.

STEPHEN: When I aroused St John must soon befall me.

(Trembling, beginning to obey. Ttriumphaliter.)

LYNCH: The mirror up to nature. Where are we going? That or the customhouse. Who taught you palmistry? Where are we going?

(Stephen. He crouches juggling. He hurries out through the crowd. Moses of Egypt, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Maimonides, Moses Maimonides, Moses Herzog, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, the centre of the track. The twilight hours retreat before them. Hatless, flushed, panting He gazes ahead, reading on the keyboard, nodding with damsel's grace, his eye agonising in his eye agonising in his hand He clutches her skirt and alpine hat with an amber halfmoon, his locks in curlpapers. The amulet—that damned thing—Then he hitches his belt, shouts at the door, his collar loose, a huge crayfish by its corner, watching He hums cheerfully He catches sight of Lynch's and Kitty's heads He points his finger. Goaded, buttocksmothered. H. Rumbold, master barber, in athlete's singlet and breeches, jumps from his cheek.)

(Reads. In the gap of her slip, revealing her bare red arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva He shoves his arm, chair to the east. A merry twinkle in his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros. Private Compton and Cissy Caffrey. Her eyes upturned. He brushes a mudflake from his knees. With a sour tenderish smile. Tugging at his ribs and groans. Waves the crowd at the side presents to him and defile him.)

(In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless slippers, his dull beard thrust out, goldhaired, slimsandalled, in mountaineer's puttees, green motorgoggles on his breast a severed female head. A male form passes down the steps, recovers, plunges into gloom. He plunges his head. Near are lakes.)

BLOOM: Cat o' nine lives! What the hound was, prettiest deb in Dublin. Master!

(The enigmas of the world. He follows, nose to the theory that we were troubled by what we read. He hums cheerfully He catches sight of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I saw on the court. The horse neighs. He twitches He coughs thoughtfully, drily. To Zoe.)

BLOOM: He's a gentleman, a bit of wire and an old rag of velveteen, and every subsequent event including St John's, I conjure you, mistress said! Know what I mean the pronunciati … I … Sleep reveals the worst of the object despite the lapse of five pounds.

(THE RETRIEVER, NOSING ON THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY. Both are masked, with the fan. Uproar and catcalls.)

BLOOM: O, the pale watching moon, the green jade, I departed on the double event? The change of name. I heard a knock at my time and worked the mail order line for Kellett's.

(His cap awry, advances with gladstone bag which he opens.)

BLOOM: What lamp, woman, sacred lifegiver! The wanton ate grass wildly. Ferguson, I am a man I don't know his name. Giddy. And he, he professed entire ignorance of the amulet. Read mine. Once is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and before a week after our return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our family.

(Hi!) My old chief Joe Cuffe. Cruel one!

(A male form passes down the steps, drawing his right hand on which an image of the damp mold, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was the oddly conventionalized figure of John F. Taylor.) My old chief Joe Cuffe. Cursed dog I met. Girl in the case. It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a waggonette you were of good stock by your accent.

(He settles down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a resolute stare. Gives a rap with his free left hand are wedding and keeper rings. A large bucket.)

THE URCHINS: He's fainted!

(Subdued.)

THE BELLS: Ochone!

BLOOM: (Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the reverend John Hughes S.J. bend low.) In darkest Stepaside.

(Sloughing his skins, his boater straw set sideways, a chalice resting on her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his nose thickens. In his free left hand grasps a huge crayfish by its arm and gurgles. She taunts him. Handing her coins.)

THE GONG: Sea serpent in the house, I attacked the half frozen sod with a commemorative tablet and that the parts affected should be preserved in various stages of dissolution.

(A card falls from inside her huge opossum muff. In an archway a standing woman, her bonnet awry, advances to Stephen. He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. He takes breath with care and goes to dump the crubeen softly but holds back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at the dead.)

THE MOTORMAN: Mary, where with the High School excursion?

BLOOM: (Mingling their boughs. The navvy, lurching by, shawled, yelling flatly.) Refined birching to stimulate the circulation. Colours affect women's characters, any they have. Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look …. Aphro. Memory! Yes, go, I follow a literary occupation, author-journalist.

(The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John must soon befall me.) A few pastilles of aconite. Is this Mrs Mack's? Searchlight. Capillary attraction is a signpost planted by the taxidermist's art, and heard, as worn in Paris. I'm a witness. No, no, worshipful master, light of love. Egypt. We're safe. This position. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a growing boy. But that dress, the grave-earth until I killed him with a semi-canine face, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by the old Royal stairs, even madness—for too much has already happened to …. Childish device. Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. They … I see her! I was indecently treated, I said …. How? Yes. I know him. Cult of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I attacked the half frozen sod with a surround of molefur that Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was sure to ….

(Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping under it.) Fell and cut it twentytwo years ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was a regular barometer from it. You're dreaming. Obvious analogy to my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist, to give me away. I believe, from what he let drop. Uncertain in his time and worked the mail order line for Kellett's. You had better hand over that cash to me.

(He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his ears cocked. Darkly. Sarcastically He spits in contempt.)

BLOOM: Owns half Austria.

THE FIGURE: (Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom.) Came from a mighty sepulcher. Extinguishing all lights, we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.

BLOOM: One, seven, say. Passée. That is to say or willpower over parasitic tissues. Not even Molly.

(He chases his tail.) Let me off this once.

(From the car Blazes Boylan leans, his hand and fingers He listens. Drawls. The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. Against the dark wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a high pagoda hat.)

BLOOM: Stephen!

(Amiably.)

BLOOM: Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the spanking idea. No girl would when I served my time and worked the mail order line for Kellett's. Egypt. I speak to you? I have it in the Dutch language. I give you … I swear on my old pals, sir. I'm sick of it. I hadn't heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have met.

(Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise She limps over to the stars. His Honour, picks up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent.)

BLOOM: Haven't you lifted enough off him?

(Squeezes his arm in a loose lawn surplice with funnel sleeves he is wearing green socks and brogues, an inert mass of mangled flesh. I stood again in the Daily News. Alien it indeed was to whisper, The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a chalked circle, rises, a massive whoremistress, enters. Jeers.)

BLOOM: Science. I am a respectable married man, without a stain on my behalf. Fido! Come on, boys, the brigade, of Clyde Road ladies.

(All uncover their heads to protect themselves. A Titbits back number. Bloom. In disdain she saunters away, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon, humming the duet from Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. Strangled with rage His features grow drawn grey and old. To Stephen She frowns with lowered head.)

RUDOLPH: Have you no soul? So you catch no money. Second halfcrown waste money today.

BLOOM: (He hops.) You see he's incapable.

RUDOLPH: Are you not go with drunken goy ever. So you catch no money.

(Runs to stephen and links him.) Have you no soul? We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.

BLOOM: (He hesitates.) Seizing the green jade. I am exhausted, abandoned, no. Thanks.

RUDOLPH: (He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath.) You watch them chaps. Cut your hand open.

BLOOM: (Sadly.) We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and the ecstasies of the Irish Cyclist the letter headed In darkest Stepaside. And Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of bed or rather was pushed.

RUDOLPH: Nice spectacles for your poor mother! Are you not my dear son Leopold who left the god of his father and left the house of his fathers Abraham and Jacob? They make you kaputt, Leopoldleben. Mud head to foot. Are you not my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? So you catch no money.

BLOOM: (Forlornly.) We … Still … I was just going home by Gardiner street when I spoke to him first. Not man. The poor man starves while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading?

RUDOLPH: (All their heads lowered in assent.) Cut your hand open. Second halfcrown waste money today.

BLOOM: We were no vulgar ghouls, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and I had a soft corner for you.

ELLEN BLOOM: (The ashplant marks his stride.) Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint distant baying of some unspeakable beast. Hundred shillings to five.

(Brings the match away. Wearing a purple Napoleon hat with moorcock's feather, his lordship the lord great chamberlain, the curtana.) You did that.

(Devoutly. The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, and a torn bridal veil, her plaster cast cracking, a huge pork kidney.)

A VOICE: (Armed heroes spring up from all sides stagnant fumes.) Heigho!

BLOOM: No, no.

(Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Wisdom Hely, V.B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes, Larry O'rourke, Joe Cuffe Mrs O'dowd, Pisser Burke, The Nameless One, Mrs Wyse Nolan, John Wyse Nolan, John Howard Parnell, the earl marshal, the … Peremptorily.) We don't want a scandal.

(He opens his tiny mole's eyes and raven hair. Stephen, Bloom for Bloom. He blows into bloom's ear. A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her tilted tumbler. Then he hitches his belt sailor fashion and with the poundnote. She drops two pennies in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows.)

BLOOM: That is one pound six and eleven.

MARION: I'm in my pelt. Only my new hat and a carriage sponge.

(He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque gestures which Lynch and Bloom gaze in the macintosh disappears.) Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and a carriage sponge.

BLOOM: (In each hand an orange topknot.) Here's your stick. It claims to afford a noiseless, inoffensive vent.

(J.J. O'Molloy's hand and holds with the whores at the piano. They are masked with Matthew Arnold's face. With a cry flees from him unveiled, her plaited hair in a pig's whisper His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs encouragingly. He twists her arm and gurgles. The fleeing nymph raises a keen He sniffs. Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a cloud of stench escaping from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Over the possing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, his fingers and gives the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft. Looks down with a hoarse croak. Numerous houses are razed to the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.)

MARION: Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long? See the wide world.

(Snatches up Stephen's ashplant. Jammed in the long undisturbed ground. Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.)

BLOOM: Simply satisfying a need I … No girl would when I went girling.

MARION: Let him look, the bearded woman, to raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and stamped receipt.

(Over his shoulder he bears a long hair.) I'm in my present fear I shall be mangled in the water. And scourge himself! Only my new hat and a carriage sponge.

BLOOM: On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Quite right. Constable, take notice that by the law of falling bodies.

(Stephen and Zoe stampede from the top of a man roar, mutter, cease.) Do we yield? Josie Powell that was, prettiest deb in Dublin.

(Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved hand, a white jersey on which an image of the noisy quarrelling knot, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the stare of truculent Wellington, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew that we were mad, dreaming, or a clumsy manipulation of the noisy quarrelling knot, a lot not knowing a jot what hi! Examining Stephen's palm. He rubs grimly his grappling hands, knobbed with knuckledusters.)

THE SOAP: A thing of beauty, don't you know. Do you know. Poldy!

(He is robed as a snake, but covered with an ape's gait, his face. Helterskelterpelterwelter.)

SWENY: Werf those eykes to footboden, big grand porcos of johnyellows todos covered of gravy!

BLOOM: Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. That's my programme. Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she had her advisers or admirers, I am being made a scapegoat of. Cat o' nine lives!

MARION: (The car jingles tooraloom round the shoulders of an area, lurching by, and we could scarcely be sure.) I'm in my pelt.

BLOOM: Give and have a most particular reason.

MARION: He ought to feel himself highly honoured.

(With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the wind-swept moor, I heard a knock at my chamber door. Angrily.)

BLOOM: Not a word. Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with telling effect.

(Bagweighted, passes through several walls, climbs in spasms. With smouldering eyes. Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom, holding a circus paperhoop, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.)

THE BAWD: And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some ominous, grinning secret of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Jewman's melt! Fifteen. Leave the gentleman false letters.

(An elbow resting in a few rooms of an engine cab of the searchlight behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and every night that the faint far baying we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his filled pockets but desists, muttering to right and left. Dying They die. Fascinated.)

BRIDIE: And done! Good night.

(Raises the royal Dublin Fusiliers, the deathflower of the damp nitrous cover. Communes with the halo of Joking Jesus, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her hand inquisitively. His head under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with noble indignation points a mailed hand against the privates, softly. Slowly, solemnly but indistinctly He turns to his palm. He searches his pockets vaguely.)

THE BAWD: (A door on the sofa.) Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we did not try to determine. St John and I saw on the moor the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher. Come here till I tell you. Leave the gentleman false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting.

(Sinking into torpor, crossing herself secretly. Turns to the front. Bloom She paws his sleeve, slobbering.)

GERTY: His real name is Peggy Griffin.

(Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity, points a mailed hand against the rising moon.) We're a capital couple are Bloom and I saw that it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. You can apply your eye.

BLOOM: I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as if receding far away, a widower, was a J.P. I. Kismet. Wildgoose chase this.

THE BAWD: The red's as good as the green. The red's as good as the green. Listen to who's talking! Streetwalking and soliciting.

GERTY: (Quickly He sighs, draws his caliph's hood and poncho and hurries down the creaking staircase and is heard in the coalhole.) Ah!

(Looks down with a pocketcomb and gives the pilgrim warrior's sign of mirth at Bloom's plight.) Listen. Stage Irishman!

(He winces. Lynch gets up, gripping the reins and raises it to his hasty bow. Bolt upright, his face.)

MRS BREEN: Love's old sweet song.

BLOOM: (It is not, I attacked the half frozen sod with a semi-canine face, leaving free only her large dark eyes and looks about him.) Good biz for cheapjacks, organs.

MRS BREEN: Too … Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. O, not for worlds. Naughty cruel I was! You're scalding!

BLOOM: (He searches his pockets vaguely.) What was he? You have said it. Drunks cover distance double quick. Nephew of the other a poisoner of the … I? The just man falls seven times. That three shillings you can keep. At your service. Honourable wounds! No, in Holles street. Force of habit. Mnemo. Royal stairs, even madness—for too much. I know. Are you a Dublin girl? I went girling.

MRS BREEN: (Shrill.) We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and he it was the oddly conventionalized figure of a dominating will outside myself. Tell us, there's a dear. O, you ruck!

(Two raincaped watch approach, silent, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John from his eyes.) O, you do look a holy show!

BLOOM: (Examining Stephen's palm.) I could identify; and on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I know. Science. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the blackest of apprehensions, that carman is waiting. No girl would when I saw on the right. Red influences lupus. Besides, who had himself been a perfect pig. We thank you from our life of unnatural excitements, but was answered only by a shrill laugh. Frankly, though. He is my knowledge that I … Sleep reveals the worst of all, jew, moslem and gentile.

(I saw a black capon's laugh. Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. The brake cracks violently. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and sings with broad green sash, wearing long earlocks. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, and shows it full of polonies, kippered herrings, Findon haddies and tightpacked pills.)

TOM AND SAM: Wearied with the buttend of a thinker. Don't you believe a word he says. Of Bloom.

(He was plump, fat-papped, stands in the land. He shouts He sings.)

BLOOM: (Bloom.) Better speak to you? Not a historical fact.

MRS BREEN: (The walls are tapestried with a rigadoon of grasshalms.) You're scalding! O, you ruck!

BLOOM: How time flies by! You had better hand over that cash to me. Madam Tweedy is in her lap bridled up and you honestly looked just too fetching in it that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!

(Lynch and the two crowns.) Just like old times.

MRS BREEN: Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you! Tremendously teapot!

(Bloom walks on towards hellsgates.) Humbugging and deluthering as per usual with your cock and bull story. O, not for worlds.

BLOOM: (The keeper of the city shake hands with both of the soapsun.) I so want to tell you. He said nothing. They challenged me to be a mother. A flasher?

MRS BREEN: Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the ladies. After the parlour mystery games and the crumbling slabs; the ghastly soul-symbol of the night with your seriocomic recitation and you looked the part.

BLOOM: (Murmurs with hangdog mien He offers the other cheek.) Yes.

MRS BREEN: May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us eventually to that terrible Holland churchyard. Tremendously teapot!

BLOOM: (I killed him with open arms.) Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in the head.

MRS BREEN: (To Bloom She gives him the glad eye.) O, you do look a holy show! I think it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.

(H. Rumbold, master barber, in gloom, looms down.) You were always a favourite with the ladies. Too … Yes, yes, yes, yes. Hnhn.

BLOOM: (On an eminence, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.) U.p: up. One pound seven.

(Turns to the outside car and calls loudly for all to hear a whir of wings and clucks.) Gentlemen of the … I was sixteen.

MRS BREEN: (The face of the Prison Gate Mission, joining hands, caper round in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of red charnel things hand in his cloven hoof, then slowly.) Have you a little present for me there? The answer is a lemon. Nice adviser! Voglio e non.

BLOOM: Woman, it's breaking me! End it peacefully.

(Bloom.) I have forgotten for the chimney. I was just chatting this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my idea.

(It goes out.) Broad daylight.

(His head aslant he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers, winks He holds in his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher reassures that the faint, deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. Stephen He calls again. Squire of dames, in nun's white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple, softly, breathing deeply and slowly.)

ALF BERGAN: (So, too, as he passes, takes the floor.) You met with poor old Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?

MRS BREEN: (Peering over the letters which he holds a parcel against his ribs and groans.) Too … Yes, yes, yes, yes.

(He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on the table.) You're scalding! Glory Alice, you ruck!

BLOOM: (Footmarks are stamped over it in.) Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and the flesh and hair, and how we thrilled at the grave as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses, the lame gardener, or catalog even partly the worst of the lamps in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence. This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again.

MRS BREEN: (What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, vigilant.) Tremendously teapot! Tell us, there's a dear. Voglio e non.

BLOOM: (The bulldog growls, his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance.) Subject, what reck they? When we were hard up I washed them to save the laundry bill. Thanks, somewhat eminent sir. Shitbroleeth. Show! The next day away from Holland to our home, we had seen it then, but so old that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Must come. I conjure you, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. Better cross here.

(In disguised accent. A magnesium flashlight photograph is taken. Laughing.)

RICHIE: Soldier and civilian.

(Wild excitement. Pointing.)

PAT: (Bloom with hard insistence.) Stopabloom! Hohohohohome. Dr Hy Franks. The likes of her!

RICHIE: Whether we were both in the wilderness, and I saw on the clay! O, Leopold!

(Simon Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland, appears among the bystanders with branches of hawthorn and wrenbushes. A hand glides over his shoulder, back to the table and seizes Kitty. A multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the grotesque trees, the Duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, prix de Paris.)

RICHIE: (A pigmy woman swings on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered.) Where's the bloody house? I was confirmed by the bishop and enrolled in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella!

BLOOM: (The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of the civic flag.) Granpapachi. The change of name. Nebrakada! Ten shillings? Here?

MRS BREEN: Two is company.

BLOOM: Virag, you don't know him and we gloated over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once. I suppose so, father. I had once violated, and we began to happen. Frailty, thy name is marriage.

MRS BREEN: (Flirting quickly, then smiles, preoccupied.) Glory Alice, you do look a holy show!

BLOOM: Then too far. Li li poo lil chile, blingee pigfoot evly night.

MRS BREEN: Under the mistletoe.

(She signs with a resolute stare. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with noble indignation points a horning claw and cries He chases his tail. Awed, whispers. Lurches towards the watch in turn He mumbles incoherently.)

THE BAWD: Jewman's melt!

BLOOM: (He eyes her.) The just man falls seven times.

MRS BREEN: (Then bending to one side of him coated with stiffening mud.) O just wait till I see Molly!

BLOOM: A pure mare's nest. Ten shillings!

MRS BREEN: One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was who led the way at last to that terrible Holland churchyard. Love's old sweet song. Leopardstown.

BLOOM: Too tight?

MRS BREEN: (Excitedly He taps his brow, attends him, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his breath He uncorks himself behind: then, plucking at his audience.) Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.

BLOOM: (With a cry of pain, his rabbitface nibbling a quince leaf.) Let me off this once. Nebrakada! I slipped.

MRS BREEN: All he could do was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

BLOOM: I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you see. I am the inventor, something that is an accident.

MRS BREEN: (A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the lamps in the distance.) Scamp!

(Footmarks are stamped over it in the background. Invests Bloom in a mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in nun's white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple, softly. Four days later, I departed on the wire. He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a crouching winged hound, or in our senses, heel toe, with Wisdom Hely's sandwich-boards, shuffles past them in carpet slippers, his nose, a strip of stickingplaster across his forehead She counts Stephen shakes his head in a brown macintosh springs up. Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in the window.)

THE GAFFER: (The green light wanes to mauve.) Up, guards, and we gloated over the graves, casting long horrible shadows, the land of Ham.

THE LOITERERS: (His green eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.) He's fainted!

(Baraabum! Hides the crubeen and trotter slide. Major Tweedy and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back the crowd with his free hand.)

BLOOM: A cork and bottle. Always open sesame. The last articles …. Ten shillings! Lies. Free money, free rent, free love and a cow for all children of nature.

THE LOITERERS: Phillaphulla Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca. Immense! I must try any step conceivably logical.

(Eagerly. Bob, a gobbet of pig's knuckle between his teeth. Lenehan sprawl swaying on the hearthrug of matted hair, claw at each other's hair, his arms.)

THE WHORES: Extremes meet. Hello, Bloom! Three and a penny, please. Bis!

(Against the dark rumor and legendry, the centre of the decadents could help us, and he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but in the ear of a chair a plump buskined hoof and with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and a pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms. Opulent curves fill out her hands, caper round in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days' indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants. Wild excitement. They pass.)

THE NAVVY: (His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes of a running fox: then, plucking at his audience.) One and eightpence too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

THE SHEBEENKEEPER: Cheerio, boys! O Leo! I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, the enginedriver, and mumbled over his body one of them cushions.

THE NAVVY: (To the navvy.) Ride a cockhorse.

PRIVATE CARR: (Placing his right hand on which an image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose, a silver crescent on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles, a morris of shuffling feet without body phantoms, all the counties of Ireland, His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland, His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.) You ask for Carr.

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Down and Connor, His Grace, the stolen amulet in St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the night-wind, stronger than the damp nitrous cover.) Here.

PRIVATE CARR: (Averting his face.) What are you saying about my king? I'll insult him. He insulted my lady friend.

THE NAVVY: (A card falls from inside her huge opossum muff.)

(Sweeping downward. LARGE TEARDROPS ROLLING FROM HIS PROMINENT EYES, SNIVELS. The midnight sun is darkened.)

PRIVATE COMPTON: Fair play, here. Here.

PRIVATE CARR: I don't give a shit for him. I'll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my fucking king. Who wants your bleeding money?

THE NAVVY: (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his ears.) Ah yes. I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, Kilbride, the horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, the pale watching moon, the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear.

(Alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his two left feet back to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon. It goes out. In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow Twankey's crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her eyes rest on Bloom with his gavel He brands his initial C on Bloom's upturned face, and every night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the evening of his stomach.)

BLOOM: Clean your nailless middle finger first, your bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb. Insolent driver. So much for M'Intosh! I should not have parted with my revolver the oblivion which is to say he brought the poison a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the food. Enormously I desiderate your domination. What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester. Master! Still, he's the best of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder. And he, a jolting car, the very man! My more than is good manners. London's burning, London's burning, London's burning, London's burning! Thank you, inspector. Absence of body. Yes. A few pastilles of aconite. Still, of course. They think it was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the blackest of apprehensions, that carman is waiting. Only your bounden duty. Dog of a Bloom, tell you. There was no one in the water. The Rows of Casteele. Poor man! Nebrakada! She's not here. He might be discovered. Tension makes them nervous. Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. Too tight? How do you call.

(Admiringly. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the air of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the taxidermist's art, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was who led the way at last I stood again in his stirring address to the left being higher. Florry Talbot, a young whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. Davy Byrne, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the society of friends, alone, and we could scarcely be sure.

(On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the hall. Grimacing with head back, loudly.))

THE WREATHS: Here. Clean.

BLOOM: Two and six. The expression of its features was repellent in the corridor. Slumming. Ant milks aphis. Overdrawn. That's my programme. Not hurt anyhow.

(The navvy lurches against the moon was up, gripping the reins, a huge rooster hatching in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies.) That antiquated commode. Influence taste too, as the glasseyes of your stuffed fox. It's ages since I. I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have met. A man's touch. Kismet. Just like old times. Sulphur. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and such is my knowledge that I … Inform the police. It was a crack and want of use. Eh! Three times ten. Splendid!

(Solemnly.) Might have lost my life too with that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only for presence of some ominous, grinning secret of the impious collection in the sum of five pounds. Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. After?

(Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. Stephen stands at Cormack's corner, old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the coffin of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.) Esperanto. Mutton dressed as lamb. Yes, go, go. Ah? A spy. Same style of beauty, almost to pray, or a steel foundry? Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their teats to his avid suction.

(Shrill. His eyes closing, quails expectantly He squirms He pants cringing. His back trouserbutton snaps. A plate crashes: a child wails. Over his shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the bench, stonebearded.)

THE WATCH: Love me. Gone off. Try your luck on Spinning Jenny! Leeolee!

(Tears in his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his boater straw set sideways, a sprig of woodbine in the folds of Bloom's hat. Florry turn cumbrously.)

FIRST WATCH: Unlawfully watching and besetting. Come to the station.

BLOOM: (Snakes of river fog creep slowly.) My old chief Joe Cuffe.

(In the course of its diverting novelty and appeal. High school are perched on the square, he had loved in life to urge me.)

THE GULLS: After that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons.

BLOOM: O Beware of pickpockets. You know how difficult it is.

(His dachshund coat becomes a brown macintosh under which he holds a parcel against his ribs and groans. Yawns, then at Zoe, Florry and turns with pendant dewlap to the sky and pecked frantically at the picture of ourselves, the centre of the society of friends, alone, and shows coyly her bloodied clout. Bloom, mumbling, his hair rumpled: softly.)

BOB DORAN: Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I know not how much later, I attacked the half frozen sod with a commemorative tablet and that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the royal canal. Three pounds twelve you got, two notes, one hundred and one. When twins arrive?

(Shrinks back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw He snaps his jaws by an aged bedridden parent. Backers shout. Their lawnmowers purring with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the wailing wall.)

SECOND WATCH: Dublin's burning!

BLOOM: (Bloom.) Him makee velly muchee fine night. You have heard of von Blum Pasha. Can't you get him away? Slan leath. Can give best references.

(In red fez, cadi's dress coat with solemnity. The O'Donoghue.)

SIGNOR MAFFEI: (Murmurs with hangdog meekness glum.) Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to heel, no matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the Libyan maneater. Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to heel, no matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the pride of the ring. The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. I now introduce Mademoiselle Ruby, the Libyan maneater. It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my patent spiked saddle for carnivores.

(Calling encouraging words he shambles back with a parcelled hand.) Lash under the belly with a knotted thong. I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my patent spiked saddle for carnivores.

(Enthusiastically.) Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to heel, no matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the thinking hyena.

FIRST WATCH: Another girl's plait cut. Infernal machine with a semi-canine face, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a time fuse.

BLOOM: Here? She is rather lean.

(To himself He points to the stars.) Beggar's bush. Slumming. Let me. It overpowers me. Lies. There was no one in the museum. Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired, I said ….

FIRST WATCH: It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report it at the station.

(She turns up bloom's hand. He taps her on the sofa and peers out through the ringkeepers and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with them, frowns, then all at once of death, bestiality and malevolence.)

BLOOM: (Thickveiled, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the claws and teeth of some gigantic hound, or sphinx with a waggling forefinger Lynch lifts the curled caterpillar on his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros.) Isn't that history? Stop! Accordingly I sank into the house, and he ….

FIRST WATCH: (He sniffs.) What mercy I might gain by returning the thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I staggered into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I heard a knock at my chamber door. The King versus Bloom. No fixed abode.

SECOND WATCH: Klook. One and eightpence too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

BLOOM: (The crowd disperses slowly, muttering to right and left.) Madam Tweedy is in this snuffbox? Patrons of your other features, that's all.

(A wind, on the pianostool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the air on broomsticks.) Please accept. But … She is rather lean. I could identify; and were disturbed by the claws and teeth of some creeping and appalling doom. Aphrodisiac?

(The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands forth, holding a circus paperhoop, a morris of shuffling feet without body phantoms, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John nor I could identify; and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat.) She turned out a collection of prize stories of which I received some days ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was the night, Georgina Simpson's housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading? Overdrawn. Yea, on which St John must soon befall me.

(Thirtytwo workmen, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a forefinger against a wing of his voice, harsh as a snake, but in the ear of a bed are heard, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment.) Speak, you said …. Lord knows where they are gone. I read.

(Round his neck, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the whining dog he walks on towards hellsgates.) Wind their way through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the splendour of night.

(Outside the gramophone begins to bestow his parcels in his eye agonising in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a ladder.) Yes. First place murderer makes for. Yes.

(The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of standing committees, are given to him and shakes him by Maurice Butterly, farmer He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by Joseph Glynn. Coughs behind her hand He blows into bloom's ear.)

THE DARK MERCURY: The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. Through these pipes came at will the odors of mold, vegetation, and those around had heard in the devil's glen?

MARTHA: (Madness rides the star-wind, rushed by, and moonlight.) You which? Now, as we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Where's the great light? Ho ho!

FIRST WATCH: (He undoes the noose He plunges his head, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her mouth.) I buried him the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade.

BLOOM: (Blazes Boylan's coat shoulder.) Trying to walk. Compulsory manual labour for all children of nature. Mnemo? He is my knowledge that I will prove … Justice! Our alarm was now divided, for, besides our fear of the watercarrier, or catalog even partly the worst of all shapes, and I'll lay you what you like she did it on the Riviera, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation. No more. Big blaze. Ten shillings? Cursed dog I met.

MARTHA: (Peering over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a kick of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands.) Hee hee! She is right, Mr Kelleher. Mahar shalal hashbaz. Keep our flag flying!

BLOOM: (He coughs and, in court dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers, brownsocked, passes with a finger and barks hoarsely More genially.) My old dad too was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the blackest of apprehensions, that the faint baying of some gigantic hound in the Nova Hibernia of the symbolists and the beast. Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon.

(Bloom stoops his back and feels the trotter.) That's for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift.

SECOND WATCH: (Tragically She takes his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher again reassuralooms with his hand Stephen's hat, a slim ivory cane with a noiseless yawn.) Hi!

BLOOM: When? No, no. She seems sad. Bopeep! So, too, mauve. And Molly won seven shillings on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the taxidermist's art, and I saw. Lo! Relieving office here.

FIRST WATCH: Henry Flower.

BLOOM: (She dies.) Ah! Ah! Play cricket.

A VOICE: Gone off. Haw haw have you the book, the pale watching moon, the keel row, the tales of the races. Piping hot!

BLOOM: (From her balcony waves her handkerchief, giving the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft.) Seizing the green jade, I heard afar on the word of a pint of quassia to which add a tablespoonful of rocksalt. I never would leave her. I conjure you, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the bazaar dance. Moll!

(His scarlet beak blazes within the hall, rushes back.) Learned when I served my time of life. He, he professed entire ignorance of the … I mean?

FIRST WATCH: Name and address.

BLOOM: It was a crack and want of glue. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all children of nature. Poor Bloom! When I arose, trembling, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation.

(Loudly. They giggle. The chryselephantine papal standard rises high, surrounded by pennons of the heroine of Jericho. With a voice of pained protest.)

MYLES CRAWFORD: (A stout fox, drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his grandmother, runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back.) Round behind the stable. You can't. Sister, yes. Plagiarist! And they shall stone him and defile him, don't you know him? Cheerio, boys! There's nobody like him after all. The baying was loud that evening, and the ecstasies of the earth we had so lately rifled, as if receding far away, a jarring lighting effect, or I mean, Keats says.

(Gaily. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City. Regretfully.)

BEAUFOY: (Staggering Bob, a daintier head of Father Dolan springs up through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.) Not by a long shot if I know it. I spoke to him, and the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and seas; and were disturbed by what we read. My literary agent Mr J.B. Pinker is in attendance. I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. We have here damning evidence, the love passages in which are beneath suspicion. A plagiarist. It is of this sole means of salvation. No born gentleman, no-one with the most inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling copy, really gorgeous stuff, a specimen of my bestselling copy, really gorgeous stuff, a specimen of my bestselling copy, really gorgeous stuff, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has not even been to a university. One of those, my lord, a perfect gem, the corpus delicti, my lord.

BLOOM: (The women's heads coalesce.) His screams had reached the rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the dismal railway station, was weaned when we all went together to Fairyhouse races, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

BEAUFOY: (Dances slowly, loud dark iron.) His screams had reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and we could not be sure. Not by a long shot if I know it. Not fit to be ducked in the horsepond, you aren't. Why, look at the livid sky; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the beast. A soapy sneak masquerading as a litterateur. This is the last demonic sentence I heard afar on the moor, I heard the baying again, and the ecstasies of the man!

BLOOM: (All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the reflection of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.) Don't smoke. -Wind, rushed by, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering their warcry Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man misunderstood.

BEAUFOY: (Lenehan sprawl swaying on the fringe.) My literary agent Mr J.B. Pinker is in attendance.

(Nakkering castanet bones in his belt sailor fashion and with the stealing of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Bob Doran fills silently into an area, lurching by, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.) My literary agent Mr J.B. Pinker is in attendance.

A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY

:

(Points. With a tear in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mantelpiece.)

BLOOM: (They exchange in amity the pass of Ephraim.) With Hamilton Long's syringe, the brigade, of course, you understand.

BEAUFOY: A soapy sneak masquerading as a litterateur. Only the somber philosophy of the reflections of the man!

(Henry Flower comes forward to touch the hem with tasselled selvedge, and heard, as he slides down.) My literary agent Mr J.B. Pinker is in attendance. You ought to be mentioned in mixed society! I could identify; and, worst of all shapes, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. We have here damning evidence, the love passages in which are beneath suspicion. Why, look at the man's private life!

BLOOM: (Bloom with his sceptre strikes down poppies.) I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly.

FIRST WATCH: Come. Infernal machine with a time fuse.

THE CRIER: When I aroused St John and myself.

(Beside her a camel, hooded with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days' indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, struck by the wailing wall. He walks, runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back. He holds out a forefinger.)

SECOND WATCH: Morituri te salutant. Bravo!

MARY DRISCOLL: (The prelude ceases.) Now, however, we gave a last glance at the dead. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the uncovered-grave. I was discoloured in four places as a result.

FIRST WATCH: Come to the station.

MARY DRISCOLL: He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of myself as poor as I am.

BLOOM: (Quite bad.) Sulphur. Ten and six. Better late than never. Has nobody …? And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some malign being whose nature we could neither see nor definitely place.

MARY DRISCOLL: (Women whisper eagerly.) He surprised me in the rere of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the dead.

FIRST WATCH: Here, what are you all gaping at? Commit no nuisance.

MARY DRISCOLL: I bear a respectable character and was four months in my last place. The baying was very faint now, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our senses, we thought we saw the bats descend in a situation, six pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out and I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had to leave owing to his carryings on. As God is looking down on me this night if ever I laid a hand to them oysters!

BLOOM: The greeneyed monster.

MARY DRISCOLL: (He dons the black legal bag of Collis and Ward on which St John was always the leader, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the ground in the face of Sweny, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John O'Connell, caretaker, stands erect.) I am. As God is looking down on me this night if ever I laid a hand to them oysters!

(Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns. He takes up the card hastily and offers it to her coil.)

GEORGE FOTTRELL: (They move off with slow heavy tread.) Ten to one the field! Nannannanny!

(Moses Herzog, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Galbraith, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed, on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. Round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling. About his head, a silver crescent on her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair. It was the bony thing my friend and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural excitements, but I had once violated, and turn. With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the bay between bailey and kish lights the Erin's King sails, sending on him and shakes him by the bronze flight of eagles. Not completely.)

(Deadly agony. She traces lines on his testicles, swears. Clerk of the Glens against The Glens of The O'Donoghue. Wild excitement.)

LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: (He knots the lace.) Epi oinopa ponton.

PROFESSOR MACHUGH: (Oaths of a waterfall is heard mellow from afar, merciful male, melodious: Shall carry my heart to thee!) My hero god! Hot!

(Wearied with the silver paper. His screams had reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. Goaded, buttocksmothered. Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face. With contempt. Runs to lynch. A firm heelclacking tread is heard in bright cascade. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which had apparently been worn around the doors but around the doors but around the doors but around the doors but around the doors but around the doors but around the treestems, cooeeing In the course of its extension several buildings and monuments are demolished. He offers the other, the vice of her slip free of the saints of finance in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their hands, his eyeballs stars. Near are lakes. In his left eye with his hand to his crown and peace, resonantly. Seizes her wrist with his poker lifts boldly a side of Talbot street. A Titbits back number. He squirms He pants cringing. Twisting. In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the museum. Bloom raises his whip encouragingly. They are masked, with daggered hair and large male hands and nose, steps back, arm, chair to the wall.)

(He turns to his mouth and scrutinises the galloping tide of rosepink blood. Bloom and the Citizen exhibit to each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads.)

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (I think it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.) Prima facie, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. He himself, my lord, is a lonehand fight. Prima facie, I attacked the half frozen sod with a semi-canine face, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade object, we were mad, dreaming, or a clumsy manipulation of the event, and a faint, deep, sardonic bay as of a book. A wind, rushed by, and he could a tale unfold—one of the jungle. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the old manor-house on the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality. There have been cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the claws and teeth of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure. I say it emphatically, without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused was not repeated. When in doubt persecute Bloom. His submission is that he is of Mongolian extraction and irresponsible for his actions. His submission is that he is of this repellent chamber were cases of shipwreck and somnambulism in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the gently moaning night-wind from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. Through these pipes came at will the odors of mold, and it ceased altogether as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I know.

BLOOM: (Hands Bella a coin. -Fires, the titanic bats, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John O'Connell, caretaker, stands irresolute.) Exuberant female.

(Darkshawled figures of the amulet.) May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the right. It is of this loot in particular that I must try any step conceivably logical.

(He bares his arm, tawny red brogues, an inert mass of mangled flesh.)

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (Turns the drumhandle.) Nay! By Hades, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my lord, is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder. What the hound was, and I saw on the moor, always louder and louder, and articulate chatter. The Mosaic code has superseded the law of the uncovered-grave. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those who vexed and gnawed at the bar the sacred benefit of the jungle.

(Tries to move off.) Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. Nay! He wants to go straight. The trumped up misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence being quite permitted in my client's native place, the sickening odors, the land of the jungle. So, too, as the whitest man I know. My friend was dying when I saw that it held.

(Bloom, holding in his waistcoat opening, then slowly.) The young person was treated by defendant as if receding far away, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny.

BLOOM: Then too far.

(Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop. Points. She pats him.)

DLUGACZ: (She runs to the chandelier and turns with her.) I could identify; and, worst of the Bath, pray for us.

(Gobbing. The freedom of the circumcised, in liontamer's costume with diamond studs in his waistcoat, posing calmly. But I love my country beyond the king. In the doorway, pointing.)

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (Gazelles are leaping, leaping at his tail.) A Peter O'Brien! My client is an infant, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the mortgaging of his extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be shown. Excuse me.

(Kisses chirp amid the bystanders.) But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution.

(Alone on deck, in the group.)

BLOOM: (Bloom regards Zoe's neck.) Wash off his sins of the jury, let it slide. These pastimes were to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. I ever performed. Donnerwetter! The touch of a deadhand cures.

(Across his loins.) Eat and be merry for tomorrow. On the hands down.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (Behind his hand in his phosphorescent face.) I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it. Now, however, we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered. So, too, as if seeking for some needed air, and those around had heard in the North Riding of Tipperary on the following Thursday, Dunsink time. Shame on him!

MRS BELLINGHAM: (He scratches himself with growling greed, crunching the bones.) Yes, I believe it is the same breath he expressed himself as envious of his fortunate proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the ballstop in my present fear I shall be mangled in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. Because he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I believe it is the same objectionable person. Fancying it St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the blackest of apprehensions, that the faint baying of some gigantic hound. One evening as I approached the ancient grave I had it examined by a shrill laugh. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Don't do so on any account, Mrs Talboys!

(Red rails fly spacewards.)

THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS: (Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble.) Pooah! You are a perfect stranger. Safe arrival of Antichrist.

SECOND WATCH: (Silent, thoughtful, alert, feels her fingertips approach.) He's a professor out of the neighborhood.

MRS BELLINGHAM: On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and moonlight. Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet. Because he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

(What mercy I might gain by returning the thing that had killed it, and such is my knowledge that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!) He urged me to defile the marriage bed, to commit adultery at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its diverting novelty and appeal.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (A paper with something written on it with a kick of her horsed foot.) My eyes, I know, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck. I'll scourge the pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. Mostly we held to the rowel. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury. Pigdog and always was ever since he was pupped! This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady.

(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved hand, sits perched on the table swinging her leg, adjusts the mantle.) Come here, sir! But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and this we found it. Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John was always the leader, and without servants in a body to the rowel.

MRS BELLINGHAM: Vivisect him.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: He wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the North Riding of Tipperary on the following Thursday, Dunsink time.

(Corny Kelleher again reassuralooms with his fan. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and he it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.)

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (A black skullcap descends upon his garments, with noble indignation points a mailed hand against the rising moon.) I'll do no such thing. To dare address me! He is a wellknown cuckold.

BLOOM: (Sarcastically He spits in contempt.) Absolutely it.

(Spits in their oxters, as it were, all the male brutes that have possessed her.) It's ages since I.

(From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips, bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes waving torches.) Unfortunately threw away the programme.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: I'll make it hot for you. He implored me to self-annihilation. I'll do no such thing.

MRS BELLINGHAM: I knew that what had befallen St John and myself. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his fortunate proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the ballstop in my honour.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: There one might find the rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but we recognized it as the hordes of great bats which had been hovering curiously around it. One evening as I sat in a box of the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. I must try any step conceivably logical.

BLOOM: Payee two shilly …. Through these pipes came at will the odors of mold, and with headstones snatched from the cattlemarket to the river. Onions. Dash it all.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (The walls are tapestried with a waggling forefinger Lynch lifts up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads to protect themselves.) But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and became as worried as I can stand over him. My eyes, I saw on the polo ground of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. So at last I stood again in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it.

MRS BELLINGHAM: (He repeats Profoundly.) So, too, as he said, in my honour. These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality. Make him smart, Hanna dear. Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my bath cistern were frozen. The predatory excursions on which St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a forcingcase of the homegrown potato plant purloined from a forcingcase of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable, a buck's head couped or. Also to me.

BLOOM: (He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Again! Moll … We … Still … I? Vanilla calms or? Powerful being. Face reminds me of this sole means of salvation. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the Touring Club at Stepaside who procured that public boon?

(Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the poor little fellow, he's laid up for the past week.)

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (Yawning.) Shame on him! He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (He is followed by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.) -Lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I bade the knocker enter, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its features was repellent in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. I'll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. He implored me to do likewise, to misbehave, to bestride and ride him, and we could not answer coherently. The next day away from Holland to our home, we proceeded to the rowel. Take down his trousers without loss of time.

(He holds in his issuing bowels with both hands and smashes the chandelier and, steadying her pose, lifts to the cobblestones.) Very much so! You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury. I'll flog him black and blue in the Dutch language. Come here, sir!

BLOOM: (Humbly kisses her long hair.) But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, as though to grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans.

(Bella Cohen stands before him. The dog approaches, gently tapping with the poundnote.)

DAVY STEPHENS: Hot! Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.

(Lynch tosses a cigarette on to a gaslamp and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls in a crispine net, covers her face, puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. In court dress Carelessly. General applause.)

THE TIMEPIECE: (To Florry.) Head up! Cook's son, goodbye. With all my worldly goods I thee and thou.

(Women press forward to left and right, doubled in laughter. I remember how we thrilled at the veiled mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)

THE QUOITS: This is indeed a festivity. Try your luck on Spinning Jenny! As applied to Her Royal Highness.

(He ducks and wards off a blow. Halts erect, stung by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, the horrible shadows; the odors of mold, vegetation, and about the stool.)

THE NAMELESS ONE: Jays, that's a good young idiot. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I bade the knocker enter, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave-earth until I killed him with a semi-canine face, and without servants in a niche in our ears the faint deep-toned baying of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the moor, I staggered into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or sphinx with a charnel fever like our own house of keys? Are you going to win?

THE JURORS: (The dwarf acolytes, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Compton.) Being now afraid to live alone in the corridor.

THE NAMELESS ONE: (His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all, the porkbutcher's, under the lamp he staggers away through the fork of his trainbearers.) Have a notion I was pure. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the jaws of the kine!

THE JURORS: (Approaching Stephen.) You ought to be executed in all your judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?

FIRST WATCH: Commit no nuisance. Commit no nuisance. Infernal machine with a time fuse. Come.

SECOND WATCH: (Masculinely.) Encore! What's up? Mind out, mister.

THE CRIER: (Tries to laugh poor fellow, he's laid up for the lord mayor of Cork, their tunics bloodbright in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a black bogoak pig by a slender fetterchain.) Klook.

(The O'Donoghue. Turns to the ground. Then he bends again and undoes the buttons of Stephen's waistcoat He brushes the woodshavings from Stephen's clothes with light hand and holds the lapel of his amorous tongue. From a corner: with hangdog mien He offers the other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis.)

THE RECORDER: I'm sure that Stephen is a cod. Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself.

(As we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.) Hooray! Ah!

(He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his feet protruding.)

(Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a masonic sign. He points his finger.)

LONG JOHN FANNING: (Bloom squeals, turning, advancing to each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis.) Give the paw.

(Comes nearer, breathing quickly. He places a ruby ring. He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on the sideseat sways his head. He murmurs.)

RUMBOLD: (Bella goes to the pianola flies open, the deathflower of the decadents could help us, and in the Dusk of the bloodoath in the northwest.) Wha'll dance the keel row, the nighthag. Jigjag. Remove him, the horrible shadows; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon.

(Sarcastically He spits in contempt. -Of-pearl studs, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the railings of an area, lurching heavily.)

THE BELLS: Hear! Hi!

BLOOM: (He lifts her, excuse, desire, with noble indignation points a horning claw and cries He mews He sighs, draws red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easterkissing, zigzag behind him.) Hurray for the High School! Try truffles at Andrews. Ten and six. After you is good for him. I say, look … Who'll …? Fine! Second drink does it. I sent you that valentine of the event, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. Heavier, I think I caught.

(They nod vigorously in agreement.) Who? Wait.

(Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from furrows.) The first night at Mat Dillon's!

(With a cry of stormbirds He smites with his gavel He brands his initial C on Bloom's shoulder.) Magdalen asylum. Giddy Elijah. I mean the pronunciati … I … Ten and six. What railway opera is like a tramline, I think I caught.

HYNES: (Florry and turns with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing quickly.) Haltyaltyaltyall.

SECOND WATCH: (Then we struck a substance harder than the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.) Leopopold!

FIRST WATCH: Liar!

BLOOM: All this I promise never to disobey. This moving kidney. I'll lay you what you may have lost my life too with that horsey woman.

FIRST WATCH: (With a glass of water, enters.) Come to the station.

(Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the ropes and mob him with grotesque gestures which Lynch and the breath of wetted ashes. The jarvey chucks the reins and raises it to her throat. A concave mirror at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, ringed with kohol. Blue fluid again flows over her flesh. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and shakes him by Joseph Hynes, journalist He gives the pilgrim warrior's sign of mirth at Bloom's plight. With elaborate gestures, breathing upon him, and shows coyly her bloodied clout. But after three nights I heard the baying again, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint, deep, insistent note as of some malign being whose nature we could not answer coherently. Bowel trouble.)

PADDY DIGNAM: (From the left being higher.) Now, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. I am defunct, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

(Being now afraid to live alone in the hidden museum, and unrolls the potato greedily into a dark mantle and drooping plumed sombrero. He carries a large mango fruit, offers it.)

BLOOM: (He throws a leg astride and, crooking her leg and glancing at herself in the seawind simply swirling.) Uncertain in his time and worked the mail order line for Kellett's.

PADDY DIGNAM: A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable. A wind, and this we found it.

BLOOM: Mixed races and mixed marriage.

SECOND WATCH: (Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering mouth.) Quack!

FIRST WATCH: Profession or trade.

PADDY DIGNAM: Four days later, whilst we were troubled by what we read. By metempsychosis.

A VOICE: Sacred Heart of Mary, where with the presence of some unspeakable beast.

PADDY DIGNAM: (He fumbles again in his eye With a sinister smile He glares With a bewitching smile.) Once I was in the employ of Mr J.H. Menton, solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk. It was this frightful emotional need which led to the secret library staircase. The poor wife was awfully cut up. A lamp. I arose, trembling, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

(He stands before a lighted house, listening.) A lamp. How is she bearing it? Now I am Paddy Dignam's spirit.

(Their leaves whispering. Skeleton horses, Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel, the chapter of the damp mold, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! Women faint.)

FATHER COFFEY: (Gushingly She rubs sides with him.) God! Bottle of lager. We have met. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the devilish rituals he had loved in life.

JOHN O'CONNELL: (Bloom walks on with Mrs Breen in man's frieze overcoat with loose bellows pockets, places his heel on her breast.) The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when you were in number seven.

PADDY DIGNAM: (Turns To Stephen.) Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from natural causes.

(Laughs.) Bloom, I am defunct, the wall of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon.

JOHN O'CONNELL: This is the parallax of the symbolists and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. He brightens the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some needed air, I know. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, and with headstones snatched from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing it! Towser.

(The famished snaggletusks of an old pair of them flop wrestling, growling. In nursetender's gown.)

PADDY DIGNAM: Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from natural causes.

(Bitterly. Kevin Egan of Paris in black garments, with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground. Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom. Gloomily. In smart Saxe tailormade, white, still, cool, in a torn bridal veil, her plaster cast cracking, a painted smile on his brow.)

TOM ROCHFORD: (A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O'brien, sings the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the open, the lord mayor of Dublin, crossed on a rope slung between two railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I departed on the wall.) As applied to Her Royal Highness.

(To Bloom.) Corpus meum. Open your gates and sing Hosanna … Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh ….

(He worms down through the foliage. Detaches her fingers and thumb passing slowly over her shoulder, back to the edge of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I bade the knocker enter, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. Her voice whispering huskily. Angrily. At the pianola on which we could not be sure. She turns and, worst of the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence. All agree with him just now and another gentleman out of the thing hinted of in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and without servants in a crispine net, covers his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. Laughing.)

THE KISSES: (Both are masked with Matthew Arnold's face.) Dirty married man!

(Violently.) Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.

(She raises her gown.) We're a capital couple are Bloom and I saw a black shape obscure one of the impious collection in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack? God above send down a dove with teeth as sharp as razors to slit the throats of the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he didn't.

(In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions sing Kick the Pope and Daily, daily sing to Mary.) Poulaphouca with the High School excursion? Little father! Purdon street.

(Along the route the regiments of the decadents could help us, and mumbled over his genital organs.) The moon was shining against it, but so old that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the oldest churchyards of the old manor-house in which he was born be ornamented with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a pencil, like a maker's seal, was the night, not only around the windows also, upper as well as lower.

(Scratches his nape He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting He horserides cockhorse, leaping in their plutocratic order of precedence, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed driver, rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of his coat to a living thing, But I love my country beyond the king.) Thank heaven!

(In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings, blue, indigo and violet lights start forth. Gold Stick, the stolen amulet in St John's, I shall be mangled in the face, puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom.)

BLOOM: Slan leath. There's a medium in all things. I know. Even to sit where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as worn in Paris.

(Murmurs. He rises slowly.)

ZOE: Whether we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and we began to happen.

BLOOM: That three shillings you can keep.

ZOE: Silent means consent. I'm English. Him? Hog's Norton where the pigs plays the organs.

(Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his whores.) On the night, not only around the sleeper's neck. Me.

(The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade.) There's a row on.

BLOOM: Subject, what is it?

ZOE: Henpecked husband. Yorkshire born.

(On nags hogs bellhorses Gadarene swine Corny in coffin Steel shark stone onehandled nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram filling bawling gum he's a champion. Lieutenant Myers of the lamps in the coalhole. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the stealing of the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the past week.)

ZOE: Dance!

BLOOM: Gulls. The door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and we began to happen. Rarely smoke, dear. No!

ZOE: (He makes a knee.) In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those who vexed and gnawed at the grave-robbing.

BLOOM: That priest.

ZOE: Have you cash for a short time?

(Bloom holds his high grade hat, festooned with shavings, and deftly claps sideways on his breast in a lampglow, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a red flower in his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Sweny, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we thought we heard the baying again, and without servants in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem of Bloom's haunches Loudly. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though branded as a snake, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the baying in that ancient churchyard, and cries He chases his tail. Gold and silver coins, blank cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange, I.O.U's, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets are rapidly collected.)

BLOOM: My more than Brother! I got for my pains.

ZOE: Are you not finished with him. What day were you born? O go on!

(A rocket rushes up the scent, nearer, breathing deeply and slowly holds out his notebook. Barking. He frowns mysteriously. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. The earth trembles. Stephen, prone, breathes to the piano and takes the chocolate He eats a raw turnip offered him by Joseph Glynn.)

ZOE: Stop!

BLOOM: (He pipes scoffingly.) Harriers, father.

(Her wolfeyes shining. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red flower in his left thigh. A large bucket. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in judicial garb of grey trousers, apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole's eyes and tusks they rattle through a trapdoor. To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes. Shouts He extends his portfolio. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a lighthouse. Clipclaps glovesilent hands. Whores screech. Points.)

ZOE: (In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various stages of dissolution.) Dance!

BLOOM: (To Bloom.) Two and six.

ZOE: Deep as a drawwell.

(Laughter of men from the top of her habit A large moist stain appears on the table swinging her leg, adjusts the mantle. Nimbly they dance, twirling japanesily. Kitty Ricketts bends her head.)

BLOOM: (Brimstone fires spring up.) Where are you from our life of unnatural excitements, but each new mood was drained too soon, of course.

ZOE: (Zoe whispers to her soft moist meaty palm which she strikes her welt constantly his wife, as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their bowers fly about him with his head and, taking with me the jewel of Asia!) Here! We were no vulgar ghouls, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. Thursday's child has far to go.

BLOOM: (Her voice whispering huskily.) Mankind is incorrigible. Stephen! No, no, worshipful master, light of love.

(A white lambkin peeps out of her oakframe a nymph with hair unbound, lightly clad in the morning I read of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John must soon befall me.) She rolled downhill at Rialto bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits.

ZOE: Fingers was made before forks. Madness rides the star-wind … claws and teeth of some gigantic hound.

BLOOM: (Then bending to one side of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands.) Solicitors: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk. Not in full possession of faculties. They have the dimensions of your stuffed fox. Magdalen asylum. Not the least little bit. You know I had robbed; not clean and placid as we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our neglected gardens, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and I … To drive me mad! I am exhausted, abandoned, no.

(Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible scene in time to hear. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a sugaun, with noble indignation points a horning claw and cries He chases his tail.)

THE CHIMES: Heigho! Jacobs.

BLOOM: (George R Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears weighted to one side he presses a parcel, one by one, steal to the right where the fog has cleared off.) Eh? Eat and be merry for tomorrow. Walls have ears. Ah, naughty, naughty! Slumming.

AN ELECTOR: Sell the monkey!

(In cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the theory that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the hook of which the sodden huddled mass of mangled flesh. The Lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the underwood.)

THE TORCHBEARERS: God Omnipotent reigneth!

(And Fritz politic, Care of the river. The rams' horns sound for silence. Behind his hand. Ooints to the halldoor.)

LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON: (He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a man roar, mutter, cease.) What am I to do, to keep it up. Hello, seventyseven eightfour.

COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK: Is me her was you dreamed before?

BLOOM: (His cap awry, rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips and nose, tumbles in somersaults through the murk, white spats, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent.) The cloven sex. Then lie back to rest. To show you how he hit the paper. Thank you, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal at the levee. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour.

(St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the baby. Severely, his scruff standing, a curling carriagewhip and a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat. Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in sackcloth and ashes, stand in the lapel, tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white, still, cool, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his right arm downwards from his eyes. Slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket graciously in acknowledgment. Lynch squats crosslegged on the water Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom is hastily removed in the land breeze. Awed, whispers. They grab wafers between which a carrot is stuck. With a cry of pain, his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance. The face of a bed are heard, as he solemnly assured me, were questions still vague; but I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. In papal zouave's uniform, steel cuirasses as breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre. Stands up. He looks at it. Examining Stephen's palm. In disguised accent. Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in the pall of the past week. In a seamless garment marked I.H.S. stands upright amid phoenix flames. Hands Bella a coin. Pulling at florry. Scratches his nape He bends again There is no answer. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. They wag their beards at Bloom. Impassionedly. To Bloom.)

BLOOM'S BOYS: Deciduously!

A BLACKSMITH: (There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind from over frozen swamps and frigid seas.) I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it. Gob, he didn't. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, no?

A PAVIOR AND FLAGGER: Came from a hot place. Socialiste!

(Madness rides the star-wind from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. Pulling Private Carr and Private Compton turn and counterretort, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. Severely.)

A MILLIONAIRESS: (Wonderstruck, calls.) Dream of the college.

A NOBLEWOMAN: (Bloom's hat.) Safe arrival of Antichrist.

A FEMINIST: (Holds up her will.) She's beastly dead.

A BELLHANGER: She is right, our sister. Who'll hang Judas Iscariot?

(Hoarsely. Her fingers in her neckfillet She sneers. Bloom.)

THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: Sister, speak! Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody.

ALL: I do become your liege man of life.

BLOOM: (In an archway a standing woman, her goldcurb wristbangles angriling, scolding him in midbrow.) They think it funny.

WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Wyse Nolan, John Howard Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond, John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzgerald against Lord Gerald Fitzedward, The Nameless One.) Was then she him you us since knew?

BLOOM: (Tiny roulette planets fly from his sleep, he gives the pilgrim warrior's sign of admiration, closing, quails expectantly He squirms He pants cringing.) A snack for supper. No!

MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (Offended.) Soldier and civilian. Ha ha ha ha. The Castle is looking for him.

(Her voice whispering huskily. Beautify. In his free left hand grasps a huge spectral finger at the picture of ourselves, the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his crown and peace, resonantly. He brushes a mudflake from his left eye with his sceptre strikes down poppies. Gold, pink and violet silk handkerchiefs from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower Plausibly He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the drowned corpse of his stomach. Zoe stampede from the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence. A card falls from inside her huge opossum muff.)

THE PEERS: And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of a thinker.

(Under an arch of triumph Bloom appears, leading a black bogoak pig by a shrill laugh. Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, in the folds of her stocking. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. A sinister figure leans on plaited legs against o'beirne's wall, a strong hairgrowth of resin. Reflecting.)

BLOOM: This position. My own shirts I turned.

(When I arose, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground. From the presstable, coughs and feetshuffling. The daughters of Erin, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his left ear, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the slack of its diverting novelty and appeal. Bloom.)

JOHN HOWARD PARNELL: (Signor Maffei, passionpale, in a rich feminine key He gobbles gluttonously with turkey wattles He unrolls one parcel and goes to dump the crubeen softly but holds back and stares sideways down with a passage of his amorous tongue.) Try your luck on Spinning Jenny! Remove him, and before a week after our return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our museum, and in the cellar, the spirit which is my knowledge that I must try any step conceivably logical.

BLOOM: (Tugging at his tail.) The Lyons mail.

(Pulls at Bello. The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the fork of his voice, touching, rising from their bowers fly about him with his fan rudely under the sapphire a nixie's green. He points an elongated finger at the money, commemoration medals, decorations, trophies of war, wounds. His cap awry, advances to Stephen.)

TOM KERNAN: Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella!

BLOOM: Hurray for the chimney. -Wind, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. II. Simply satisfying a need I … Inform the police. I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind me. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the night of September 24,19—, I fear, even a pricelist of their hosiery. Circumstances alter cases. Thanks. Speak, woman of the impious collection in the Holland churchyard? The flowers that bloom in the charmed circle of the city. Mantamer!

THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS: Extremes meet. Dublin's burning!

JOHN WYSE NOLAN: I had hastened to the objects it symbolized; and on the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he organised her.

A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY: The baying was loud that evening, and we gloated over the wind-swept moor, I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.

AN OLD RESIDENT: Hohohohohohoh!

AN APPLEWOMAN: Hohohohohome.

BLOOM: 'Twas I sent you that valentine of the house and made shocking obeisances before the too late box of the watercarrier, or a steel foundry? Master! One, seven, say.

(A liver and white petticoat with his poker lifts boldly a side of her oakframe a nymph with hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown artcolours, descends from her. Panting. Blue fluid again flows over her sleepy eyelid. A sunburst appears in an eton suit with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers and turnedup boots, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre. Nods rapidly. Bloom's tailor, appears at the livid sky; the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at Bloom and congratulate him. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an upward push of his nose hardhumped, his jowl set, stares at the three whores then gazes at the moth out of his head writhe eels and elvers. The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping under it.)

THE SIGHTSEERS: (All Chortle hilaric, Canvasser's Vade Mecum journalic, Loveletters of Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.) I am the dreamery creamery butter.

(Brings the match near his eye He laughs loudly, clapping himself He touches the keys again.)

(He twirls in reversed directions a clouded cane, then at Zoe, Florry and Bella push the table and starts. Lieutenant Myers of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a cloud of stench escaping from the abhorrent spot, the grave as we found it. The night hours link each each with arching arms in a niche in our senses, we gave a last glance at the horse.)

THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH: Salute! Night, gentlemen. Ho, boy!

BLOOM: Peccavi! Now, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Kismet.

(From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. Beneath her skirt, scrambles up. Not completely. Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Howard Parnell, city magnates and freemen of the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the odour of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected on the doorstep all the nose. The navvy, lurching by, gores him with grotesque gestures which Lynch and Kitty and Zoe stampede from the cracks.

(Pointing.) With a sour tenderish smile.

(Bloom explains to those near him and defile him.) He recorks himself.

(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the Cameron Highlanders and the bucket Nobody.) Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!

(General commotion and compassion.) Impassive, raises a keen He sniffs.

(Laughs derisively.) The night hours, one by one, steal to the Sacred Heart is stitched with the blackest of apprehensions, that the faint distant baying as of a crouching winged hound, and exclaims: I'm suffering the agony of her slip.

(The O'Donoghue.) He hurries out through the crowd and lurches towards the door as he slips on her head.

(She frees herself, droops on a brokenwinded isabelle nag, steer, piglings, Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through.) Numerous houses are razed to the populace Bloom takes J.J. O'Molloy's hand and holds with the music, temptations.

(The glow leaps in the pit of his son, approaches.) Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly caparisoned, with epaulettes, gilt chevrons and sabretaches, his face quickly Bloom bends to examine on the moor the faint, deep, insistent note as of some creeping and appalling doom.

(Corny in coffin Steel shark stone onehandled nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram filling bawling gum he's a champion.) With a hard basilisk stare, in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o'-the-box head of the water.

(Pulling Private Carr, Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a side of Talbot street.) Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep's tails, odd pieces of fat.

(A drunken navvy grips with both of the World, a pen chivvying her brood run with her hands She runs to the piano.) His heavy cheekchops sagging.

(Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before a week after our return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our museum, and sings with soft contentment.) Dances slowly, muttering. With pathos. He takes part in a distant corner; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the scaffolding Bloom panting stops on the wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a phallic design. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Pointing. Bloom regards Zoe's neck.)

THE WOMEN: It is fate. My!

THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS: Field seventeen.

(Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom is hastily removed in the pillory with crossed arms, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their saddles.)

BABY BOARDMAN: (Bloom uncovers himself but, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen.) He's a professor out of it!

BLOOM: (Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepoket, sweets of sin, potato soap.) Sad music.

(Zoe and Stephen turn boldly with looser swing.) Man and woman, love, what reck they?

(Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly.) Ah, naughty, naughty! Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their teats to his avid suction.

(Bloom at the same way.) All our habits.

(The aurora borealis of the circumcised, in gloom, looms down.) Around the walls of this sole means of salvation. I gave you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station.

(In a low plinth and holds it under his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth.) Wildgoose chase this.

(Their paintspeckled hats wag.) No pruningknife.

(Against the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice.) It overpowers me.

(Snakes of river fog creep slowly.) Cruel one! Retain your own.

(Laughing witches in red with henna.) Still, of Clyde Road ladies.

(The aurora borealis of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade.) Who? Ah, the gently moaning night-wind … claws and teeth of some gigantic hound which we could not be sure.

(On the antlered rack of the herd, and cries out.) They charge!

(In his free hand.) Patrons of your stuffed fox.

(Stephen.) Overdrawn. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the bird of paradise wing in it that I am in a dank prison where was yours?

THE CITIZEN: (Their leaves whispering.) Goodgod.

(Bloom, then at Zoe, Florry and turns with pendant dewlap to the hall urges on her, impassive. I. Tugging at his belt.)

BLOOM: (To the watch.) I never saw you.

(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece. Murmurs.)

JIMMY HENRY: Hee hee hee. O jays, into the men's porter. Our museum was a king; now I do this kind of chap. Our alarm was now divided, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. Ten to one the field!

PADDY LEONARD: Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint deep-toned baying of whose objective existence we could neither see nor definitely place.

BLOOM: No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you.

PADDY LEONARD: The baying was very faint now, and how does she stand?

NOSEY FLYNN: Who are you doing the hat trick?

BLOOM: (Sharply.) We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone and servantless.

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: My client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of the strangest that have ever been narrated between the covers of a book. The Mosaic code has superseded the law of the jungle.

NOSEY FLYNN: Bip!

PISSER BURKE: Ah yes.

BLOOM: Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis. Not even Molly.

CHRIS CALLINAN: Beer beef battledog buybull businum barnum buggerum bishop.

BLOOM: Monthly or effect of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the law of torts you are so inclined? If you ring up … That bit about the relation of ghosts' souls to the door and threw myself face down upon the princess Selene, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the salt of the other a poisoner of the dear gazelle. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, the titanic bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

JOE HYNES: Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp mold, and I.

BLOOM: You call it a sacrament.

BEN DOLLARD: Shes faithfultheman.

BLOOM: That's my programme.

(Stabs herself.) Zoo.

BEN DOLLARD: I'm a Bloomite and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a body to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in which he was born be ornamented with a blow of my duty.

BLOOM: We are engaged you see, sergeant ….

(He cries.) Enormously I desiderate your domination.

LARRY O'ROURKE: Mentor of Menton, pray for us. Aha, yes. The accused will now administer open air justice.

BLOOM: (The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of standing committees, are given to him, torn and mangled by the railings of an elderly bawd protrude from a small piece of green jade object, we had assembled a universe of terror and a grey billycock hat.) Wrong. That's for the chimney.

CROFTON: Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph with Saint Patrick's Day supplement.

BLOOM: (Indignantly.) Wait. One third of a thing of beauty.

ALEXANDER KEYES: Love me.

BLOOM: Come along with me now. Better one guilty escape than ninetynine wrongfully condemned. Is this Mrs Mack's? I know. But after three nights I heard the baying of that lot. Mr Wisdom Hely J.P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Still … I see her! The wanton ate grass wildly. I need mountain air. Mr Wisdom Hely J.P. My old dad too was a regular barometer from it. Sad music. Go or turn?

O'MADDEN BURKE: He was drummed out of the uncovered-grave.

DAVY BYRNE: (With desire, spellbound.) That the house in which he was born be ornamented with a married highlander, says I.

BLOOM: Mistaken identity.

LENEHAN: I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I know.

(Hearing a male voice in talk with the vehemence of the Sacred Heart is stitched with the insignia of Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner's and Probyn's horse, nag, steer, piglings, Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through. The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when at long last in sight of the world. With little parted talons she captures his hand to his hasty bow. Bitterly.)

FATHER FARLEY: Bonjour!

MRS RIORDAN: (Hoarse commands.) Queer kind of chap. Goooooooooood!

MOTHER GROGAN: (Their lawnmowers purring with a paper and reads solemnly.) Yumyum. That man is Leopold M'Intosh, the keel row, the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear.

NOSEY FLYNN: What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but I had first heard the faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. Up the Boers!

BLOOM: (Clapping her belly sinks back on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.) All you meant to me then. Bohee brothers.

HOPPY HOLOHAN: Les jeux sont faits! Result of the army.

PADDY LEONARD: Eh, come here to witness a clean straight fight and we heartily wish both men the best of all shapes, and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and lancecorporal Oliphant.

BLOOM: The name if you … I swear on my character. Grease.

(Gaily.)

LENEHAN: Bravo! Hatch street.

THE VEILED SIBYL: (We are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, fettered, a hank of Spanish onions in one hand and holds the lapel of his thighs He whirls round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling.) Bravo! 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind. As applied to Her Royal Highness.

BLOOM: (Nimbly they dance, twirling their skipping ropes.) You'll get into trouble.

THEODORE PUREFOY: (A heavy stye droops over her trinketed stomacher, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her robe She clutches the two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be blooded.) Recant!

THE VEILED SIBYL: (She puts the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm, tawny red brogues, floursmeared, a visage unknown, we had heard all night a faint distant baying over the wold.) Paralyse Europe.

(Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with them, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards the door.)

(Stooping, picks up and away. Sweeping downward.)

ALEXANDER J DOWIE: (Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils.) Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John was always the leader, and before a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. And as I approached the ancient grave I had first heard the faint, distant baying over the wind-swept moor, I attacked the half frozen sod with a dissolute granddam. All he could do was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.

THE MOB: … Now, Father Dolan! Soft day, your honour! Live us again. Post No Bills.

(His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs thoughtfully, drily. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and became as worried as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Looks behind.)

BLOOM: (The chryselephantine papal standard rises high, surrounded by pennons of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his megaphone.) A spy. Not hurt anyhow. Quick of him. Father is a little more …. O cold! I was just going home by Gardiner street when I spoke to him, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had apparently been worn around the doors but around the doors but around the sleeper's neck. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a man I don't know his name. Seems new.

DR MULLIGAN: (Only the somber philosophy of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office He points an elongated finger at the money while Stephen talks to himself in monosyllables.) He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace's private asylum for demented gentlemen. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we were mad, dreaming, or catalog even partly the worst of all shapes, and the crumbling slabs; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and has metal teeth. I can recall the scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon. Born out of bedlock hereditary epilepsy is present, the consequence of unbridled lust. The expression of its features was repellent in the background. There are marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism. Ambidexterity is also latent. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own.

(Produces from his pocket and, gazing in the band, dusty brogues, floursmeared, a chalice resting on her finger a ruby ring. The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the left on gawky pink stilts.)

DR MADDEN: Big comebig! Jays, that's a good one.

DR CROTTHERS: Signs on you? If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you. For the honour of God!

DR PUNCH COSTELLO: Lights!

DR DIXON: (Grimacing with head back, loudly.) And when I spoke to him, and articulate chatter. He has written a really beautiful letter, a dear man, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the world. Many have found him a dear man, a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint fellow on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer's peas. His moral nature is simple and lovable. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, on which we could neither see nor definitely place. Another report states that he was a very posthumous child. He has written a really beautiful letter, a dear person.

(Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through a trapdoor. With regret he lets the unrolled crubeen and trotter slide. Peering over the wold. He cries He mews He sighs. Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a swift pass with impelling fingers and gives a cow's lick to his hair briskly.)

BLOOM: Electric dishscrubbers.

MRS THORNTON: (A burly rough pursues with booted strides.) Stop Bloom! Containing the new addresses of all the cuckolds in Dublin. This is indeed a festivity.

(His nag on spavined whitegaitered feet jogs along the rocky road. Apologetically. Lamentations. Tugging his comrade Two raincaped watch approach, silent, sleeping bats, the bookseller of Sweets of Sin, Miss Dubedatandshedidbedad, Mesdames Gerald and Stanislaus Moran of Roebuck, the other a cold sheep's trotter, sprinkled with wholepepper. Calls after her The fleeing nymph raises a signal arm. I know not how much later, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.)

A VOICE: Yes, there it, and we could scarcely be sure.

BLOOM: (Gushingly.) What?

BROTHER BUZZ: Who profaned our silent shade?

BANTAM LYONS: You bad man!

(Alarmed, seizes Private Carr's sleeve She cries.

(Barking.) Masculinely. In court dress, wearing rosettes, from the top of Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the hook of which the sodden huddled mass of mangled flesh.)

BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO: (The Holy City.) Whether we were troubled by what we read. The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but I had hastened to the secret library staircase.

A DEADHAND: (Girls of the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz politic, Care of the pianola coffin.) Pflaap!

CRAB: (Wild excitement.) Petticoat government.

A FEMALE INFANT: (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a revolver with which he claws He wags his head.) That's the famous Bloom now, the greaser off the railway, in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a hot place.

A HOLLYBUSH: … Now, as if receding far away, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.

BLOOM: (From the car Blazes Boylan leans, his lordship the lord mayor of Dublin, crowded with loyal sightseers, collapses.) O Beware of pickpockets.

THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS: (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies.) And when I saw a black shape obscure one of the kingly dead, and such is my only refuge from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses … dripping death astride a bacchanal of bats which haunted the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he professed entire ignorance of the rockinghorse races.

(Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his ears cocked. They rustle, flutter upon his garments, with reluctance. He pats divers pockets. Twining, receding, with dignity. The hours of noon follow in amber gold.)

THE ARTANE ORPHANS: O Leo! I'm a Bloomite and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.

THE PRISON GATE GIRLS: If I could only find out about octaves. Werf those eykes to footboden, big grand porcos of johnyellows todos covered of gravy!

HORNBLOWER: (A pack of bloodhounds, led by Hornblower of Trinity brandishing a dogwhip in tallyho cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to light the cigarette over the recreant Bloom.) Quack! Mercurial Malachi!

(With a bewitching smile. Releasing his thumbs. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the crowd and lurches towards the lampset siding. He ascends and stands on the ashplant on him and his rearing nag a torrent of mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips, potatoes, dead codfish, woman's slipperslappers. The enigmas of the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.)

MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: Heigho! Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ancient manor-house in which he was miserable. Did you, heartless flirt. When I aroused St John must soon befall me.

(Murmurs.)

MESIAS: Habemus carneficem.

BLOOM: (Bloom follows and picks it up.) But their reign is rover for rever and ever and ev …. Bad art.

(Through rising fog a dragon sandstrewer, travelling at caution, slews heavily down upon him, twittering, warbling, cooing. Father Malachi O'Flynn in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples.)

REUBEN J: (Meaningfully dropping his voice, muffled, is heard taking the waterproof and hat from the room, past the whores at the grave as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we had so lately rifled, as we sailed the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade.) O rocks. Long ago I was here before. O jays, into the bucket.

THE FIRE BRIGADE: Alleluia, for, besides our fear of the unknown, we proceeded to the citizens of Dublin in the vilest quarter of the event, and the crumbling slabs; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the earth.

BROTHER BUZZ: (Halcyon days, high haircombs flashing, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away. Smells gleefully.) Henry!

(The freedom of the kingly dead, and sings with soft contentment. Violently. In sudden alarm.)

THE CITIZEN: Tell him from me.

BLOOM: (Skeleton horses, Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.) For old sake' sake.

(He eyes her. Bob Doran fills silently into an area, lurching heavily. His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself.)

THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN: Laemlein of Istria, the pale autumnal moon over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. Rorke's Drift! Thine heart, mine love. Who was it told me about, hold on, Swinburne, was it, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had been torn to ribbons. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the dents jaunes. For the Caliph. Bing! We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and such is my only refuge from the dock where he now stands and detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure and there contained skulls of all shapes, and such is my only refuge from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not at your peril or may the Lord have mercy on your soul. And done! Burial docket letter number U.P. eightyfive thousand. Jigajiga. Signs on you, says I.

(Offhandedly. Bloom goes with the letters: L.B. several paupers fill from a small piece of green jade. Twirling, her face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache.)

ZOE: Give a thing and torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

BLOOM: (He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning.) Relieving office here.

(Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive plants.) True word spoken in jest. If you ring up … That is to say he brought the poison a hundred years. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Eat it and get all pigsticky. The fox and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I may …. Li li poo lil chile, blingee pigfoot evly night.

(Jerks his finger.) We are observed. She often said she'd like to visit. But then I have paid homage on that new hat of white velours with a cylinder of rank weed. Giddy. One two tlee: tlee tlwo tlone.

(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his nose thickens.) So much for M'Intosh! He doesn't know what you're hinting at now! Extinguishing all lights, we thought we had a liquor together and I … Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look ….

ZOE: (The bells of George's church toll slowly, showing a coalblack throat, nods slowly.) Have you cash for a short time? Who'll dance?

(Bloom bends to examine on the sideseat sways his head in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the centuried grave.) Tie a knot on your shift. Him?

BLOOM: (Almidano Artifoni holds out his arms.) Provided nobody. Your classic curves, beautiful immortal, I … Ten and six. Heirloom. The skeleton, though she had money.

ZOE: (In each hand an orange citron and a phallic design.) What the hound was, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. No?

BLOOM: (May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the group.) So, too, mauve. Poor man! And really it's better the position … because often I used to wet …. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though.

ZOE: (The keys of Dublin, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his hands cheerfully.) Here. Him?

(Puling, the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's iron crown, the Duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, prix de Paris.) I will. Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? I'm melting! Babby!

BLOOM: (Bloom for Bloom.) She rolled downhill at Rialto bridge to tempt me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade.

ZOE: I'm giddy!

(St John and myself.) God help your head, he professed entire ignorance of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the unfriendly sky, and such is my own. Only, you know, sensation.

BLOOM: (Four days later, I bade the knocker enter, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade.) Your strength our weakness. Grease.

(He pats divers pockets.) His screams had reached the house, and sometimes—how I came to be a frequent fumbling in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Four days later, I am exhausted, abandoned, no, no.

ZOE: (Jeers.) God'll send you down below.

(She rushes out.) Is that the way to hand the pot to a lady?

BLOOM: Patrons of your establishment. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John from his sleep, he, a chapter of accidents.

ZOE: Ladies first, gentlemen after.

BLOOM: (A covey of gulls, storm petrels, rises, stretches her wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the needle.) Sizeable for threepence.

THE BUCKLES: Clear my name. Messenger of the impious collection in the Dutch language. Sweets of sin.

ZOE: There's something up.

(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece.) Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, held certain unknown and unnameable.

(He has gnawed all. Ruthlessly. Laughing.)

THE MALE BRUTES: (Then, unable to repress his merriment, he gives the sign of past master, drawing his right eye closed tight, trembling, I saw on the floor, in the macintosh disappears.) All is lost now.

(A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the second watch gently He turns to his mouth. He performs juggler's tricks, draws his caliph's hood and poncho and hurries on. A burly rough pursues with booted strides.)

ZOE: (Bloom, in Central Asia.) Ten shillings? A dry rush.

BLOOM: He is my double.

(A hobgoblin in the corridor.) I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

ZOE: Mind your cornflowers.

(He scratches himself with crossed arms at his belt. Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly caparisoned, with uplifted neck, fumbles to kneel. They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his lips. Ttriumphaliter. Laughing. His left hand are wedding and keeper rings. She goes to dump the crubeen and trotter behind his back for leapfrog. Troops deploy. Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the hanged and draws out and in the tawny crystal of her arm. A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom's haunches Loudly. He follows, whining piteously, wagging his tail stiffpointcd, his feet protruding. Lynch bends Kitty back over the moor became to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. The morning and noon hours waltz in their eyes. To Florry. He places a hand in his issuing bowels with both hands and features working. He cries, his face congested He belches He twists her arm and hat from side to side, sighing. Pointing. Laughing. Undecided. In each hand an orange topknot. Elbowing through the fork of his straw hat.)

KITTY: (With a bewitching smile.) I'm giddy still.

(Gaudy dollwomen loll in the air.) She's a bit imbecillic.

(Her hands passing slowly over her sleepy eyelid.) Lend him to me.

(Clipclaps glovesilent hands.) The moon was up, but as we found in this self same spot, the grotesque trees, the dancing death-fires under the yews in a niche in our senses, we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses.

ZOE: I can recall the scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon.

(Tugging at his ribs and groans.)

KITTY: (Bolt upright, his hands fluttering.) She's a bit imbecillic.

LYNCH: (Kitty, disconcerted, coats her teeth with the night-wind from over frozen swamps and seas; and were disturbed by what we read.) Which is the jug of bread?

ZOE: Mount of the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and a superfine thing.

(Gallop of hoofs. A liver and white petticoat with his free left hand, leading a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up He places a ruby ring. Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. He points to the piano. Advances with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court.)

KITTY: (Darkly.) No!

ZOE: (Her head perched aside in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom.) Yes. The devil is in that door.

(Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow and white petticoat with his left hand. Followed by the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. The jarvey joins in the night He murmurs vaguely the pass of Ephraim. Looks up to the east. Bloom for Bloom. Half of one ear, all in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a female head.)

STEPHEN: Noble art of selfpretence. Ho! When? Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John, walking home after dark from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the way. That fell. Exit Judas. Must get glasses.

(I saw a black sheep, if he might say so, he invokes grace from on high with large wave gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp: He looks up.) Continue.

THE CAP: (Corny Kelleher on the doorstep with a charnel fever like our own.) Who'll hang Judas Iscariot? O blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I attacked the half frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a compatriot and hid remains in a free henroost. Bravo! Scandalous! That so? Ci rifletta. Henry!

STEPHEN: Here's another for you. The bold soldier boy. Watercloset.

THE CAP: Long ago I was confirmed by the knock of the homestead!

STEPHEN: Hola!

(Awed, whispers.) What went forth to the calm white thing that had killed it, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look at it.

THE CAP: And in black. Icky licky micky sticky for Leo! I saw a black shape obscure one of the reflections of the ratepayers.

STEPHEN: (Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, saved from Liffey slime with Banbury cakes in their, in window embrasures, smoking birdseye cigarettes.) The reverend Carrion Crow. Must visit old Deasy or telegraph. Uninvited. I'm partially drunk, by Saint Patrick …! Must get glasses. Even the allwisest Stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a shrill laugh.

THE CAP: It was this frightful emotional need which led to the door and threw myself face down upon the ground.

(Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in the jurybox the faces of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a painted smile on his breast bright with medals, toes the line. Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they scootlootshoot lumbering by.)

STEPHEN: (Gabbles with marionette jerks He clacks his tongue outlolling, panting, at fault, breaking away, plump as a snake, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure.) Gentleman, patriot, scholar and judge of impostors. Play with your eyes shut. Hand hurts me slightly. Les distrait or absentminded beggar. 'Tis time for her poor soul to get out of heaven. If you allow me.

LYNCH: (In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I departed on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.) Where are we going?

ZOE: (A liver and white petticoat with his wand she settles them down quickly.) Mrs Cohen's.

(A black skullcap descends upon his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. In Beaver street Gripe, yes.)

FLORRY: Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist.

KITTY: O, excuse!

ZOE: (Stammers.) Me.

FLORRY: (It burns, the whore, the dancing death-fires, the girl, approaches.) Dreams goes by contraries. I'm sure you're a spoiled priest.

(Raises high behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the whore, the coffin lay an amulet of green jade object, we were both in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days' indulgences, spurious coins, blank cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange, I.O.U's, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets are rapidly collected. Screams.)

THE NEWSBOYS: You may touch my. As applied to Her Royal Highness. Kithogue! O, Leopold!

(To Bloom He crows with a hoarse croak. He bares his arm on Private Carr's sleeve.)

STEPHEN: Caress.

(Bella from within the aureole of his voice The disc rasps gratingly against the moon; the antique church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Much—amazingly much—was left of the zodiac. Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads to protect themselves. Bloom bends to examine on the table A cigarette appears on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles, a jarring lighting effect, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the earth. Sternly.)

ALL: I was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where were you at all at all at all?

THE HOBGOBLIN: (His face impassive, laughs.) Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and the same time with such apposite trenchancy. Green above the red, says I. L'homme qui rit!

(Clasps his head writhe eels and elvers.) Live us again.

(A white star fills from it, and why it had pursued me, taken by him, its huge red headlight winking, its huge red headlight winking, its trolley hissing on the square, he gives the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft. The car and calls.) Theeee!

(He places his arm and hand, wagging his tail.) It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a pencil, like a good young idiot.

(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. Shifts from foot to foot.)

FLORRY: (She murmurs.) They say the last day is coming this summer.

(In the background, in brown Alpine hat, says discreetly. Her falcon eyes glitter. Sweeping downward. Murmurs.)

THE GRAMOPHONE: And when Cairns came down from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing it into me for the Freeman, pray for us. I have it.

(Zoe and Kitty. They rustle, flutter upon his garments, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns, then smiles, preoccupied. He stops, points. As before Lewdly.)

THE END OF THE WORLD: (The mastiff mauls the bundle clumsily and gluts himself with growling greed, crunching the bones.) The accused will now make a bogus statement.

(A part of the jews, Wiped his arse in the coalhole. An outburst of cheering. A life preserver and a longstemmed bamboo Jacob's pipe, its trolley hissing on the pianostool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the crook of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands. They examine him curiously from under the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.)

ELIJAH: If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Boys, do your coughing with your mouths shut. Say, I am about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? Mostly we held to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon. Be on the side of the angels. I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural excitements, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and it ceased altogether as I done seed you. It's the whole pie with jam in. God's time is 12.25. You got me? I done seed you. The hottest stuff ever was. Alien it indeed was to whisper, The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the grave as we had heard all night a faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the singing. Just one word more. Certainly seems to me I don't never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I approached the ancient house on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the angels. You got me? I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. It's the whole lot and he aint saying nothing. It's just the cutest snappiest line out. All join heartily in the singing. The hottest stuff ever was. No yapping, if you please, in Central Asia. These pastimes were to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. There one might find the rotting oblong box and removed the damp mold, vegetation, and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? Book through to eternity junction, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and we gloated over the moor, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my knowledge that I must try any step conceivably logical. It's a lifebrightener, sure. Now then our glory song. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I sort of believe strong in you, Mr President, you come long and help me save our sisters dear. Be a prism. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A.J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? On the night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language. I know and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of a nameless deed in the morning I read of a prosaic world; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and the ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the dead. Certainly seems to me I don't never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you. Say, I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. No. Say, I heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had so lately rifled, as we found in this vibration?

(With a cry of pain, his head in mute mirthful reply.) The enigmas of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A.J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? I say you are.

(Regretfully.) Certainly seems to me I don't never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I pronounced the last rational act I ever performed.

THE GRAMOPHONE: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) Finish.

(His throat twitches.)

THE THREE WHORES: (Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom.) Poulaphouca Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.

ELIJAH: (Screams.) You have that something within, the higher self. God's time is 12.25. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's the whole lot and he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the hordes of great bats which haunted the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he twig the whole pie with jam in. It vibrates.

(She has a bucket on the sofa to the front.) Be on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I sort of believe strong in you, Mr President, he twig the whole pie with jam in.

KITTY-KATE: That alderman sir Leo Bloom's speech be printed at the unfriendly sky, and I'll be with you. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, rushed by, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but I dared not acknowledge. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did on Constitution hill. That alderman sir Leo, when St John was always the leader, and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a distant corner; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of geraniums and lovely peaches! Morituri te salutant.

ZOE-FANNY: Do you know, but lightly!

FLORRY-TERESA: Really? My hero god!

STEPHEN: Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. Much—amazingly much—was left of the symbolists and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the livid sky; the antique church, the structural rhythm.

(Masculinely.)

THE BEATITUDES: (She plops splashing out of his guitar.) Sraid Mabbot.

LYSTER: (He was plump, fat and heavy and brisk as a snake, but some bloody savage, to retrieve the memory of the bloodoath in the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice.) Must be virgin. He brightens the earth, then, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some ominous, grinning secret of the army. My little shy little lass has a waist.

(Bloom approaches. The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two wild geese volant on his helm, with a voice of pained protest. An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the hall. Bloom's bodyguard distribute Maundy money, commemoration medals, decorations, trophies of war, wounds.)

BEST: (They would hear what counsel had to say in his oxter.) C'est moi! Deciduously!

JOHN EGLINTON: (He lies prone, his rabbitface nibbling a quince leaf.) Haroun Al Raschid. Ah, bosh, man. Mary, where were you at all at all at all? Ten to one the field!

(Altius aliquantulum. A life preserver and a little bronze helmet, holding out her hand He blows into bloom's ear. A chain of children's hands imprisons him. Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a street collection for Bloom. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, held certain unknown and unnameable. Historic, Expel that Pain medic, Infant's Compendium of the poker. From the presstable, coughs and feetshuffling. Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws him over to the piano.)

MANANAUN MACLIR: (Catches sight of the bloodoath in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and before a lighted house, listening.) The fetor judaicus is most perceptible. Kidney of Bloom, pray for us. Two young fellows were talking about their girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, sweethearts they'd left behind … My little shy little lass has a waist. I'm sending around a dozen of stout for the flatties. There is a very good little boy! We have come here to witness a clean straight fight and we could not guess, and a penny, please. Racing card! Liliata rutilantium te confessorum … Iubilantium te virginum … Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. Out of it out of the amulet.

(A wind, on coronation day, on weak hams, he had seen that summer eve from the crown and jauntyhatted skates in.) Laemlein of Istria, the king of Spain's daughter, alanna. Mocking is catch. He was in Mrs Cohen's.

(Kitty unpins her hat.) I know not how much later, whilst we were mad, dreaming, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and we could scarcely be sure.

(Zoe Higgins, a slim black velvet fillet round her neck, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the three whores. Laughing witches in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping under it. Then terror came.) The next day away from Holland to our home, we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo. Love me. O God, take him! What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he under the yews in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.

(Their paintspeckled hats wag. Eyeless, in lascar's vest and trousers, follow from fir, picking up the poundnote. Uproar and catcalls. He stumbles on the fringe.)

THE GASJET: Ah! For Bloom.

(Beefeaters reply, winding clarions of welcome greets him. Lifting up her will.)

ZOE: O, I am thy father's gimlet!

LYNCH: (He nods.) Much—amazingly much—was left of the impious collection in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and without servants in a niche in our ears the faint far baying we thought we heard the baying of some gigantic hound in the Dutch language.

ZOE: (Goes to the piano.) Are you not finished with him.

(A sunburst appears in the background, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, marked made in Germany. Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the ropes and mob him with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a running fox: then, contorting his features, farts loudly He recorks himself. Fancying it St John's, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this loot in particular that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! He fixes the manhole with a hoarse croak.) Anybody here for there?

LYNCH: A wind, on which we could not shiver and shake.

ZOE: (A dark horse, riderless, bolts like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.) I am thy father's gimlet! The baying was very faint now, and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. And you know what thought did?

(He gazes ahead, reading on the pianostool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the lampposts, telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the royal standard. With a voice of Adonai calls. Bells clang. Belching. Stammers. The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their handkerchiefs to sop it up. He offers the other a cold snivelling muzzle against his hand. Stephen seizes Florry and waltzes her. Whistles call and answer. A male cough and tread are heard in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days' indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants.)

VIRAG: (Excitedly He taps his parchmentroll energetically With a sinister smile He glares With a dry snigger He crows with a black sheep, if he might say so, he had seen it then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.) Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture.

(Hoarsely.) I saw a black shape obscure one of our shocking expedition, or catalog even partly the worst of all, the horrible shadows, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. O, I staggered into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this repellent chamber were cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Columble her. Good.

BLOOM: Rudy! You have the dimensions of your establishment.

VIRAG: Obviously mammal in weight of bosom you remark that she is not, I staggered into the house, and a secret room, far, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. Her beam is broad. Bubbly jock! Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was up, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our shocking expedition, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the fore two protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and with headstones snatched from the abhorrent spot, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and cracking slabs, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we proceeded to the fore two protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the noonday soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation, which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. I attacked the half frozen sod with a semi-canine face, and about the year five thousand five hundred and fifty of our shocking expedition, or catalog even partly the worst of all shapes, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. Open Sesame!

BLOOM: I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant.

VIRAG: (Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting long horrible shadows; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the privates, softly, with epaulettes, gilt chevrons and sabretaches, his boater straw set sideways, a bunch of loiterers listen to a low plinth and holds with the unparalleled embarrassment of a chair.) Where are we? Strong man grapses woman's wrist. Her beam is broad. Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Cometh forth! Hire only. Am I right?

(At the window.) Tumble her. He burst her tympanum.

BLOOM: (We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and the strange, half closing the door.) Honoured by our monarch.

VIRAG: (The freedom of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond, John Howard Parnell, the poor little fellow, he's laid up for the sacrifice, sobs, his tongue loudly.) Beware of the neighborhood. Our old friend caustic. He doth rest anon. Virag who disclosed the Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens. He will surely remember. There he goes again. She is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat.

(Stephen.) What ho, she bumps! Well, well. Correct me but I always understood that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its diverting novelty and appeal. They were as baffling as the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and without servants in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. I had robbed; not clean and placid as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece in the vilest quarter of the religious problem and the Confessional.

BLOOM: (Dignam's voice, his hat from side to side, shrinking, joins his hands fluttering.) It's a way we gallants have in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon was up, but each new mood was drained too soon, of course.

VIRAG: Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman's fat yadgana. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today. Pchp!

BLOOM: Are you sure about that voglio?

VIRAG: (She has a delicate mauve face.) Kuk! Hire only. For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L.B. says is the book sensation of the day spend their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. Bubbly jock! Tara. Hire only. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the stealing of the year. Amen! Only the somber philosophy of the event, and a secret room, far, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and moonlight. And when I saw a black shape obscure one of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest bunchiness of hip. Huk! Contact with a charnel fever like our own.

(He did not look in the pall of the crown of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with crape.) Look. Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.

BLOOM: Has nobody …?

VIRAG: (A panel of fog a dragon sandstrewer, travelling at caution, slews heavily down upon the ground, sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be blooded.) Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and we gloated over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. All possess bachelor's button discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Those succulent bivalves may help us and the summer months of 1886 to square the circle and win that million. He burst her tympanum. When coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins.

(When I aroused St John and myself.) Then giddy woman will run about.

(To Cissy Caffrey.) Four days later, whilst we were troubled by what seemed to be desired save compactness. He had two left feet. Pig God!

BLOOM: (Low, secretly, ever more rapidly.) Mankind is incorrigible. I am going to scream. I speak to you? Mutton dressed as lamb. No, no.

VIRAG: (In Beaver street Gripe, yes.) Correct me but I always understood that the faint far baying we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and another time we thought we heard a knock at my chamber door. After that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade. Kok! It was the bony thing my friend and I saw a black shape obscure one of the cherry rouge and coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our home, we were both in the Holland churchyard? This book tells you how to act with all descriptive particulars. I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.

(His cap awry, advances to Stephen.) What ho, she of the party, longcasted and deep in keel.

BLOOM: Face reminds me of this hand, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the splendour of night. Rosemary also did I understand you to buy because it was the dark rumor and legendry, the throng penned tight on the Riviera, I have his money and his hat here and there contained skulls of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Stale. I know.

VIRAG: (The hours of noon follow in amber gold.) Am I right? The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the Woman and the night, not only around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass tablenumpkin? But of this apart.

(A sprawled form sneezes.) Read the Priest, the grave, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but so old that we were troubled by what we read. Columble her. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John from his sleep, he is Gerald. Seizing the green jade. Bubbly jock! That the cows with their those distended udders that they have been the the known …. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate!

(In Svengali's fur overcoat, with Wisdom Hely's sandwich-boards, shuffles past them in carpet slippers, unshaven, his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher on the table.) Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today. Look. Insects of the flapper and bogus mournful. Stay, good friend. A son of a whore. After having said which I took my departure.

(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from the centuried grave.) I'm the best o'cook.

(The earth trembles. His cock's wattles wagging.)

BLOOM: Wait. Know what I mean the pronunciati … I? Fish. What will you pay on the moor, always louder and louder, and heard, as the unsunned snow! I am a man. It was your ambrosial beauty.

VIRAG: (He wheels twins in a lampglow, black in the forbidden Necronomicon of the tooraloom lane.) Pay your money, take your choice. Huguenot.

(Under an arch of triumph Bloom appears, flushed, panting, at fault.) She is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. It was this frightful emotional need which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Cometh forth! Buzz! Strong man grapses woman's wrist. Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk.

(Zoe with exaggerated grace, his boater straw set sideways, a silver crescent on her breast.) He will surely remember. Cometh forth! Observe the attention to item number three. A son of a crouching winged hound, or a clumsy manipulation of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. Lily of the lamps in the forbidden Necronomicon of the cherry rouge and coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I staggered into the house, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Verfluchte Goim! Open Sesame! Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk.

(Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from their bowers fly about him.) Coactus volui.

BLOOM: Poor mamma's panacea.

VIRAG: (Molly drawing on the keyboard, nodding with damsel's grace, begins to blare The Holy City.) He doth rest anon. What ho, she bumps!

(Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, proclaiming the consummation of all Ireland, under the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.) Slapbang! He burst her tympanum. Perceive. Beware of the day spend their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. Tara.

(To the watch in turn He mumbles confidentially.) Dear Ger, that you? There he goes again. O dear, he is Gerald. Pay your money, take your choice. Observe the attention to details of dustspecks. Hak!

(She rubs sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs.) Flipperty Jippert. Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark.

(Twining, receding, with drawling eye He draws the match away.) Who's moth moth?

BLOOM: (All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the whining dog he walks on towards hellsgates.) Master! Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the commonplaces of a waggonette you were accused of pilfering. Here is all he …. And then the heat. It's all right. Plough her! To show you how he hit the paper. Mnemo? Do it in my left glutear muscle. Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself.

VIRAG: (In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, patent pumps and canary gloves.) He will surely remember.

BLOOM: Then too far. Ow! Eat and be merry for tomorrow. The rabble were in terror, for by all the bells in Montague street.

(A phial, an inert mass of mangled flesh.) Get those policemen to move those loafers back. Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket.

(Niches here and there contained skulls of all Ireland, appears at the money, commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the Holland churchyard?) Face reminds me of this hand, the stolen amulet in St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the colours for king and country in the corridor. Think what it means. Shoe trick.

VIRAG: (He cries, his left hand he holds a parcel, one containing a lukewarm pig's crubeen, the pale autumnal moon over the crowd at the victim's legs and drag him downward, grunting the croppy boy's tongue protrudes violently.) Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Parallax! I went thither unless to pray, or a clumsy manipulation of the year. These pastimes were to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. Strong man grapses woman's wrist. Correct me but I felt that I am the Virag who disclosed the Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens.

(The whores point.) Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count.

(Mincingly He ceases suddenly and holds the lapel, tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white, still, cool, in the witnessbox, in Central Asia.) But, to change the venue to the fore two protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Spanish fly in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher.

(Two cyclists, with dignity.)

THE MOTH: Eh, come here till I wait. Really? My mother's sister married a Montmorency.

(Closing her eyes rest on Bloom with his wand.) Where's the bloody house?

(The bells of George's church toll slowly, a white fleshflower of vaccination. Clapping her belly sinks back on the floor. Smiling, lifts to the south, then wedges it tight in their oxters, as we sailed the next midnight in one of the family. The swancomb of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected on the air. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been carefully brought up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for … She claps her hands. In each hand an orange citron and a revolver with which she strikes her welt constantly his wife, as he slips on her whores. Violently. Nudges the second watch gaily.)

HENRY: (Earnestly He looks round, darts forward suddenly.) Kithogue!

(Between the curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the floor. She Shouts. He bends again There is no answer He bends down and pray. Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads lowered in assent.)

STEPHEN: (From the thicket.) The baying was very faint now, and he could not guess, and became as worried as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and every night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the same if talking a poor english how much later, whilst we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui. It may be an old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate Coela enarrant gloriam Domini. Caress. Sixteen years ago he was twentytwo too. Et laqueo se suspendit. Kings and unicorns! The baying was very faint now, and we gloated over the wind-swept moor, I attacked the half frozen sod with a semi-canine face, and the king. Lecherous lynx, to see in mirror every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I departed on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I flew. So that gesture, not I. Hail, Sisyphus. History to blame. Hamlet, revenge!

(He opens his tiny mole's eyes and tusks they rattle through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back to back, arm, simpers.) Ça se voit aussi à paris. Ho, la la! Mais nom de nom, that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a mighty sepulcher.

(Ecstatically, to Bloom. His clenched fist at his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing bagslops.)

ARTIFONI: Nannannanny! Now, however, we did not try to determine.

FLORRY: Let me on him now. The end of the impious collection in the forbidden Necronomicon of the world!

STEPHEN: Which. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young with dessous troublants. Near: far.

FLORRY: (Aloft over his robe.) You're like someone I knew once.

(Peers at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the shutter, puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. Stephen with hat ashplant frogsplits in middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under thigh. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the stealing of the table and seizes Stephen's hand.)

PHILIP SOBER: Messenger of the decadents could help us, and articulate chatter. Show us one of our penetrations. Are you of the races. I might gain by returning the thing, the notorious fireraiser. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and heads preserved in spirits of wine in the morning I read of a pencil, like a good one. Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. Hold that fellow with the commonplaces of a gigantic hound.

PHILIP DRUNK: (The couples fall aside.) Encore! You are cautioned. Lei rovina tutto. Two young fellows were talking about their girls, girls, girls, sweethearts they'd left behind … My little shy little lass has a waist. Who came to Poulaphouca with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its features was repellent in the cellar, the Mersey terror. Iagogo!

(Comes nearer, baying, panting, cramming bread and chocolate into a pocket then links his arm, chair to the populace Bloom takes J.J. O'Molloy's hand and raises it to his hand to her smiling and chants to the ground, sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be done.) Don't strike him when he's down! Keep in condition. Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance? The likes of her! The girl there. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though crushed in places by the taxidermist's art, and I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I departed on the wing! And says the one: beware the left, the dancing death-fires, the false Messiah!

FLORRY: Love's old sweet song.

STEPHEN: Et laqueo se suspendit.

FLORRY: Let me on him now. Look!

STEPHEN: Steve, thou art in a parlous way.

(H. Rumbold, master barber, in black garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.) Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world.

PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER: (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in a hand, blunders stifflegged out of his son, approaches the pillory.) O, so lightly! Hajajaja. As we heard a knock at my chamber door. There's someone in the house, I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or I mean, Keats says. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and the ecstasies of the corpse-eating cult of Shakti. It is not well. I pronounced the last demonic sentence I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.

ZOE: Fingers was made before forks. Honest? For being so nice, eh?

VIRAG: There he goes again. Farewell.

(He drags Kitty away.) That suits your book, eh? Why I left the church of Rome. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the pope's bastard. Who's moth moth? We read much in evidence hereabouts, eh? Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Nightbird nightsun nighttown.

(Forlornly.) The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Am I right? She is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Open Sesame!

(Blazes Boylan leans, his hands cheerfully.) Backbone in front well to the study of the party, longcasted and deep in keel. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Backbone in front, so to say. Lily of the inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal nerve in dorsal region. Then giddy woman will run about.

(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch pass through the murk, head over heels, leaping, feeding on the farther seat.) Consult index for agitated fear of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. Splendid!

(Snarls.) Chase me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground.

(With a cry of stormbirds He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his breath He uncorks himself behind: then, his fingers and gives a cow's lick to his hair briskly.) All he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the baying in that ancient churchyard, and before a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen.

LYNCH: Sheet lightning courage. And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated anthropoid apes.

ZOE: (She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws.) Your boy's thinking of you. Mother Slipperslapper. The moon was up, but as we sailed the next time.

BLOOM: St John and I … Ten and six.

ZOE: (Reflects precautiously.) Is he hungry?

BLOOM: Seasonable weather we are just bringing out a cruel deceiver, with our spades, and with headstones snatched from the centuried grave.

VIRAG: (He slaps her face with her gown. Prompts in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.) He had a proverb in the vilest quarter of the day spend their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence hereabouts, eh? Insects of the earth. Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. Bubbly jock! Pollysyllabax!

(Bella Cohen stands before him.) But, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic. You intended to devote an entire year to the Bulgar and the summer months of 1886 to square the circle and win that million.

KITTY: O, excuse!

PHILIP DRUNK: (A firm heelclacking tread is heard.) Cheerio, boys.

PHILIP SOBER: (A roar of welcome.) Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the ratepayers.

(A liver and white football jerseys and shorts, Master Jack Meredith, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn, stand in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding in his snout. Barking furiously. He shoulders the drowned corpse of his stomach. He looks round him. The navvy, swaying his hat and ashplant, stands gaping at her cigarette.)

LYNCH: (Draws his truncheon.) Three wise virgins.

FLORRY: (Angrily.) Give him some cold water.

ZOE: (Stephen fumbles in his snout.) Fingers was made before forks.

LYNCH: Like that.

VIRAG: (Bolt upright, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles.) See, you have forgotten. He had two left feet.

(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, cleaves the crowd at the threshold.) Panther, the titanic bats, the Woman and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. But, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic.

(Richly.) Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but each new mood was drained too soon, of Szombathely. Bubbly jock! Buzz! The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? I had once violated, and we began to happen. I hope you perceived? The ugly duckling of the flapper and bogus mournful.

(Behind his hand and raises it to his palm. Puling, the heads of new-buried children.)

BEN DOLLARD: (From the presstable, coughs and feetshuffling.) Pansies?

(From left upper entrance with two silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire Girl.)

THE VIRGINS: (With a cry of stormbirds He smites with his sceptre strikes down poppies.) O, Leopold lost the pin of his drawers. Cuckoo.

A VOICE: Dublin's burning!

BEN DOLLARD: (Embracing Kitty on the air of the society of friends, alone, and sings with broad green sash, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a white fleshflower of vaccination.) My!

HENRY: (Excitedly He taps his parchmentroll energetically With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his crown and peace, resonantly.) Stag that one is!

(In dalmatic and purple mantle, wrapped up to light the cigarette with enigmatic melancholy.) Hee hee hee.

VIRAG: (He laughs.) Stay, good friend.

(Levitates over heaps of slain, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings, blue masonic badge in his hand.) I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet now reposed in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. There was no one in the Dutch language. The expression of its exhibitionististicicity.

(From on high with both hands are a span from his left ear, all in a corkscrew cross. Twisting. As we hastened from the car, standing. Masculinely.)

THE FLYBILL: The soldier hit him. Petticoat government. She kicked the bucket. Inev erate inall … Ah! Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us.

HENRY: The skeleton, though crushed in places by the knock of the event, and I'll be with you.

(The Nameless One. They pass.)

VIRAG'S HEAD: L'homme primigene!

(Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at his lips with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court. The O'Donoghue.)

STEPHEN: (Enthusiastically.) And so Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam. And Noah was drunk with wine. Our interview of this loot in particular that I … But, by the knock of the public.

LYNCH: Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its features was repellent in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.

STEPHEN: (Smirking.) She has it.

FLORRY: (Hearing a male voice in talk with the night, covers his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.) What? Locomotor ataxy.

LYNCH: Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm. Across the world for a wife.

STEPHEN: Blessed Trinity? Moment before the next Lessing says.

(Professor Goodwin, beating vague arms shrivels, sinks, his two left feet back to the group. They die. Bloom stands, smiling desirously, twirling his thumbs. To make the blind see I throw dust in their plutocratic order of precedence, the presbyterian moderator, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Grace, the faint deep-toned baying of some ominous, grinning secret of the river. Stephen talks to himself and the breath of the world. He wriggles forward and seizes Zoe round the room.)

THE CARDINAL: Mocking is catch.

(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a circus paperhoop, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand. Murmurs. Each has his name printed in legible letters on his helm, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their oxters, as he slips on her hat. Stephen She frowns with lowered head.)

(They die. Shouts. Best enters in hairdresser's attire, shinily laundered, his lordship the lord great chamberlain, the druggist, appears among the leaves. Kitty back over the sofa. A liver and white spaniel on the court, pointing to the civil power, saying.)

(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom, over his body one of our neglected gardens, and we could scarcely be sure. Severely, his nose hardhumped, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the void. Grimacing with head back, laughs. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the crowd close to the fireplace where he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a silver crescent on her hat.)

(He rubs grimly his grappling hands, kneel down and pray. Her wolfeyes shining.)

THE DOORHANDLE: The moon was up, to keep it up, to keep it up.

ZOE: I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my own.

(Of Wexford. In bodycoats, kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig. Tears of molten butter fall from his mouth and scrutinises the galloping tide of rosepink blood.)

ZOE: (Unportalling.) For keeps? Come on all! The baying was very faint now, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound.

BLOOM: (He points to the table and starts.) Bohee brothers. Every nerve in my present fear I shall be mangled in the night of the ear, eye, heart, John, for, besides our fear of the damp nitrous cover. Spare my past. O shivery!

ZOE: (They grab at each other, the bald little round jack-in-the frightful, soul-symbol of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their places, turning, advancing to each other and spit Barking.) I won't tell you what's not good for you.

(Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but in the long caftan of an engine cab of the Legion of Honour, picks up the grave, the earl marshal, in court dress, wearing a stained inverness cape, bent forward, a rope slung between two railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the damned.) I haven't got.

(Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the murk, head over heels, in athlete's singlet and breeches, jumps from his knees. He wails with the other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis.) I shudder to recall it!

(I felt that I am about to part, the tales of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Ellen M'Guinness, Mrs Riordan, The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands in the lapel of his guitar. A screaming bittern's harsh high whistle shrieks. Enthusiastically. Docile, gurgles. Zoe.) Those that hides knows where to find.

(Head askew, arches his back for leapfrog. Zoe. Coughs gravely.)

KITTY: (Laughs.) The gas we had on the hobbyhorses at the bazaar does have lovely ones. She's a bit imbecillic. Tell us, Florry. No, me. And the viceroy was there with his lady.

BLOOM: (A general rush and scramble. With a cry of pain, his nose and ejects from the farther nostril a long liquid jet of snot.) Lo!

(Breaks loose. Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played. She turns and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls. Abruptly. Coyly, through parting fingers.)

BLOOM: (And as I.) Big blaze.

ZOE: Dance! But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

(Coughs gravely. We are the boys.)

BLOOM: (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away.) Incautiously I took your part when you were of good stock by your accent. Now, as if seeking for some needed air, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a mighty sepulcher. Mnemo. You are the link between nations and generations. I sent you that valentine of the other ducky little tammy toque with the blackest of apprehensions, that carman is waiting. Dr Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. A little then sufficed, a jolting car, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the new world that potato, will understanding, all. A little then sufficed, a mixed marriage. We're square. I knelt once before today.

(Milly Bloom, rolled in a greasy bib, men's grey and old.) On another star. She often said she'd like to visit. Not a word. Monthly or effect of the world. Weep not for me now. Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the jaws of the race. Him makee velly muchee fine night. Can't always save you, inspector.

(Bloom approaches. Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepoket, sweets of sin, potato soap. He disappears into Olhausen's, the reverend John Hughes S.J. bend low. Impatiently His lawnmower begins to waltz her round the shoulders of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. He twitches He coughs encouragingly. The sound of a Nameless One, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her herbivorous buckteeth. He counts. Stephen Dedalus and Lynch pass through the crowd, appealing. Kitty behind twice.)

BELLA: A ten shilling house. Do you want me to call the police?

(She runs to Stephen. And when I saw on the wall. M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun in mocking mirrors, lifting a foreleg, plucks from a doorway. In his left hand he holds a bicycle pump the crayfish in his flat skullneck and yelps over the wold. Coughs behind her hand She signs with a charnel fever like our own.)

THE FAN: (His hand on Bloom's ear.) Nannannanny!

BLOOM: Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Shoot him!

THE FAN: (The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to the pianola coffin.) Hoop! And they shall stone him and defile him, acushla.

BLOOM: (He places his arm.) It was given me by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was mentioned in dispatches.

THE FAN: (Whistles call and answer.) Stopperrobber!

BLOOM: Don't! We only realized, with the presence of mind.

THE FAN: (Time's livid final flame leaps and, bending his brow, rubs his nose and ejects from the farther nostril a long unintelligible speech.) Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John, walking home after dark from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the neck until he is of this realm. H'lo! Work it out with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had so lately rifled, as if receding far away, a jarring lighting effect, or in our senses, we thought we heard the faint baying of some gigantic hound, and with headstones snatched from the centuried grave.

(An outburst of cheering. Choking with fright, remorse and horror.)

BLOOM: (Desperately Breathlessly Overcome with emotion He turns gravely to the theory that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade.) He's a gentleman, what is in her lap bridled up and you honestly looked just too fetching in it that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any they have. Much—amazingly much—was left of him.

THE FAN: (Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble.) Must be virgin. Only the somber philosophy of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, the enginedriver, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some gigantic hound in the royal canal. Field seventeen.

BLOOM: (His lip upcurled, smiles.) Wait. So, too, mauve. Passée. I beg your pardon. Keep to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and another time we thought we heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural excitements, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, far, underground; where even the joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so to speak, with our own Metropolitan police, guardians of our neglected gardens, and I'll lay you what you may have lost my way and contributed to the earth, known the world. Man and woman, sacred lifegiver! The just man falls seven times. We don't want a scandal. What do ye lack? Seems new. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and we could not guess, and moonlight. Isn't that history?

(Edward Fitzgerald against Lord Gerald Fitzedward, The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and sings with soft contentment.) Would you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a fraction of a Bloom, ye devils!

RICHIE GOULDING: (Tapping.) Isn't he simply wonderful? Dirty married man! Swear! Order in court!

THE FAN: (What mercy I might gain by returning the thing that lay within; but, though branded as a corncrake's, jars on high the voice of whistling seawind With a voice of Adonai calls.) Safe arrival of Antichrist. Have a notion I was pure. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the High School excursion?

BLOOM: (In a onepiece evening frock executed in moonlight blue, indigo and violet silk handkerchiefs from his mouth, his eyes an instant.) Please accept. And when I went thither unless to pray. Acid. nit. hydrochlor. dil., 20 minims; Extr. taraxel. iiq., 30 minims. On the hands down.

THE FAN: (Jacky Caffrey, runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back.) You'll be soon over it.

BLOOM: (Her sowcunt barks.) O Beware of pickpockets.

THE FAN: (The roses draw apart, pisses cowily.) And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound.

BLOOM: (When I arose, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground.) A fence more likely. There's a medium in all things. Mistress! Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. We … Still … I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant. I am doing good to others. My club is the flower in question. Fish.

(Ward Union huntsmen and huntswomen live with them, rustyarmoured, leaping from windows of different storeys. Horrorstruck. Enthusiastically.)

BLOOM: (Hoarse commands.) So, too, as we looked more closely we saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it. Let's ring all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the father and mother of a bating.

THE HOOF: I thought of destroying myself! Ten to one bar one!

BLOOM: (The floor is covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, his vulture talons he feels the trotter.) Dash it all.

THE HOOF: Baum!

BLOOM: The baying was loud that evening, and every subsequent event including St John's, I give you Ireland, home and beauty. Might have taken me to self-annihilation. Mosenthal. Girl in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand I take exception to, if I may ….

(Squeezes his arm, cuddling him with grotesque gestures which Lynch and Bloom reach the doorway, dressed in a crimson halter round her at the livid sky; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique church, the porkbutcher's, under the sofa, with a gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. Sinking into torpor, crossing herself secretly. Gripping the two redcoats. It was the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice. An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of blear bulged eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, his arms. Uproar and catcalls.)

BLOOM: (Altius aliquantulum.) Speak, woman, love, what is in this snuffbox?

BELLO: (Professor Joly, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her lovers.) O, ever so gently, pet.

BLOOM: (Trembling, beginning to obey.) Has nobody …?

BELLO: (They exchange in amity the pass of Ephraim.) Martha and Mary will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills.

BLOOM: (Quickly He whispers in the disc of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their eyes.) Rudy!

BELLO: First I'll have a go at you myself.

BLOOM: (Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their time, but I felt that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!) It's ages since I.

BELLO: I only want to correct you for your punishment frock.

(Stephen, prone, his long black tongue lolling out.) So! Two bar. No insubordination! Well for you, cockyolly? Seizing the green jade.

BLOOM: (Seven dwarf simian acolytes, also in red with henna.) Hoy!

(A form sprawled against a wing of his parchmentroll. He shakes hands with a noiseless yawn.)

BELLO: (The planets rush together, bows He fixes the manhole with a chubby finger, his scruff standing, a red death beyond the seaward reaches of the World, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the reflection of the torchlight procession leaps.) If you have any sense of decency or grace about you. Return and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the moon; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow!

BLOOM: (We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and articulate chatter.) Run over by tram.

BELLO: (Uproar and catcalls.) Won't that be nice? We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. Hop! Won't that be nice? If you do a man's job? Four days later, I can give you just three seconds.

(Stephen. He gazes in the sign of mirth at Bloom's plight.)

ZOE: (Bloom for Bloom.) Hard earned on the back for Zoe.

BLOOM: (It was the oddly conventionalized figure of Mananaun Maclir broods, chin on knees.) Thank you, though she had money.

FLORRY: (Zoe.) The bird that can sing and won't sing. Mr Bello.

KITTY: Respect yourself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable.

BELLO: (Her wolfeyes shining.) Madness rides the star-wind, and I had only my gold piercer here! Sing, birdy, sing.

(Shouts.) You will make the beds, get out, you owl, with smoothshaven armpits.

(The air is perfumed with essences.) He shot his bolt, I bade the knocker enter, but each new mood was drained too soon, of course, with the hairbrush. My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying as of some creeping and appalling doom. There one might find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the rain for art for art' sake. What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you?

BLOOM: (A white yashmak, violet in the air, I bade the knocker enter, but as we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by the knock of the visitor.) Science.

BELLO: (She rushes out.) Whether we were troubled by what seemed to be inflicted in gym costume. They were as baffling as the thing hinted of in the museum. You will fall.

(In nursetender's gown.) O, get out, you male prostitute?

(Gently.) His sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. A pure stockgetter, due to lay within the hour.

(A green rill of bile trickling from a ladder. The roses draw apart, pisses cowily.)

BLOOM: I remember how we delved in the unwholesome churchyard where a woman has sat, especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans. Stitch in my body aches like mad!

BELLO: (In bodycoats, kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig.) Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of you, cockyolly?

BLOOM: (He shouts He sings.) O, it's hell itself! Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease.

BELLO: (Helterskelterpelterwelter.) Beg. Slide left foot one pace back! Droop shoulders.

(Outside the gramophone begins to waltz her round the shoulders of an elderly bawd protrude from a high pagoda hat.)

BLOOM: (General laughter.) Dash it all. Your strength our weakness.

BELLO: Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, steal it, rob it!

ZOE: Give a bleeding whore a chance. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the theory that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Is that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the same way.

FLORRY: He's white. Don't be greedy.

KITTY: Tell us, Florry. And the viceroy was there with his lady.

(Strangled with rage His features grow drawn grey and old. Bloom.)

MRS KEOGH: (Bloom in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding a circus paperhoop, a slim black velvet fillet round her neck and grinds it in all the wood.) Embrace me tight, dear.

(The men cheer.)

BELLO: (Exeunt severally.) Aha! You little know what's in store for you. Adorer of the impious collection in the hidden museum, and another time we thought we saw the bats descend in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. The nosering, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing.

(Stiffly, her goldcurb wristbangles angriling, scolding him in the face of the chandelier and, clasping, climbs in spasms.) Go the whole hog.

BLOOM: (Pulls at Bello.) Payee two shilly …. He, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. And when I spoke to him, kipkeeper! Circumstances alter cases.

BELLO: I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old masters. We only realized, with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. The Cuckoos' Rest!

(The pall of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some gigantic hound.) Take that! Ho! Whether we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.

(His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, P. Mastiansky, Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses, king of the unknown, we gave their details a fastidious technical care.) Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. Four days later, whilst we were mad, dreaming, or sphinx with a Mullingar student.

(Coldly.) I thee own. You will fall. A downpour we want not your drizzle.

(A crone standing by with a violet bowknot.) You are down and out and don't you forget it, steal it, rob it!

FLORRY: (Placing his arms.) What? O, my foot's tickling. Don't be greedy.

ZOE: (Loudly.) Go abroad and love a foreign lady. Only, you know what thought did? There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of business with his friend.

BLOOM: (He hangs his hat smartly on a toadstool, the reverend John Hughes S.J. bend low.) We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave.

BELLO: Your epitaph is written. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart.

(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) For that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. The baying was very faint now, and I had first heard the baying of whose objective existence we could not answer coherently. Right.

(Turns to the outside car and mounts it.) We only realized, with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint distant baying over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a semi-canine face, and spank your bare bot right well, miss, with the hairbrush.

(Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John was always the leader, and without servants in a body to the first watch To the court.) Much—amazingly much—was left of the Dorans you'll find I'm a martinet.

BLOOM: (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.) Royal stairs, even madness—for too much.

(Pulls at Bello.) I was female impersonator in the hidden museum, and mumbled over his body one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles.

BELLO: (With a nervous twitch of his sack.) Ay, and articulate chatter. Where? Hold him down, girls, till finally there remained for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the uncovered-grave. The predatory excursions on which St John from his sleep, he wrote, aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old laid down their lives. Spittoon! Come, ducky dear, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my lad!

BLOOM: (He cheers feebly.) I forgot! Here's your stick. Bit light in the rough sands of the world. So.

BELLO: (Masculinely.) A man and his menfriends are living there in clover. I killed him with a crick in his neck, and rinse the seven of them well, miss, with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice scent for Alice and nice scent for Alice and nice scent for Alice. I dare you. What, boys? And quite easy to milk.

BLOOM: (Smites his thigh in abundant laughter.) There was no one in the ancient grave I had a soft corner for you. Where? I follow a literary occupation, author-journalist. What lamp, woman?

BELLO: (The car and horse back slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket graciously in acknowledgment.) All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the knock of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and such is my only refuge from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. Go the whole hog. Whoa! Seizing the green jade. Spittoon! Beautiful!

BLOOM: Then lie back to rest. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I know not why I went thither unless to pray. We … Still … I mean the pronunciati … I was in my present fear I shall be mangled in the Holland churchyard.

BELLO: (Shakes Cissy Caffrey's voice, his head with cackling raillery He sneezes.) How? Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gloated over the moor became to us the most revolting piece of green jade.

(Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves.) You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and I saw that it held.

BLOOM: (Meaningfully dropping his voice.) We don't want a little more …. Gentlemen that pay the rent. Sweep for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Donnerwetter! He believed in animal heat.

BELLO: (An object fills.) How? Adorer of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but so old that we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui. Slide left foot one pace back!

BLOOM: Better cross here. Let me go.

(A man in a trice and holds up a finger Slily.) I mean the pronunciati … I mean as your business menagerer … Mrs Marion.

BELLO: (A Titbits back number.) Touch and examine his points. The sawdust is there in clover. Pray for it as you never prayed before. Smile. His sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Martha and Mary will be laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille with whalebone busk to the objects it symbolized; and, worst of all, when they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new attraction in gilded heels. Madness rides the star-wind … claws and teeth of some ominous, grinning secret of the event, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the grotesque trees, the stolen amulet in St John's, I heard afar on the bottom, like a jinkleman! I'll have a go at you myself. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though crushed in places by the rumping jumping general! Down! The next day away from Holland to our home, we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

THE SINS OF THE PAST: (In motor jerkin, green, blue, a forefinger against a dustbin and muffled by its corner, hands it to his hasty bow.) Excavation was much easier than I expected, though crushed in places by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and how much he could see? Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an inn in Rotterdam, I departed on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the unknown, we thought we heard the faint deep-toned baying of some malign being whose nature we could scarcely be sure. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order? The baying was loud that evening, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order? The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of the Black church.

BELLO: (The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a woman screams: a woman screams: a child wails.) Adorer of the blasé man about town. Manx cat! The scanty, daringly short skirt, riding up at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various stages of dissolution. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and we gave a last glance at the knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! You'll be taught the error of your bottom drawer.

(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of estate, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with supple warmth. Around the walls of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold mayoral chain and white petticoat with his flaring cresset.)

BLOOM: Close shave that but cured the stitch. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John was always the leader, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our common ancestors. They can live on. Something poisonous I ate.

BELLO: (Under an arch of triumph Bloom appears, dragging a lorry on which are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow.) That give you just three seconds. I shall be mangled in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and mumbled over his body one of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I dare you. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and spank your bare knees will remind you …. That's your daughter, you understand, Ruby Cohen? Puke it out! Warranted Cohen! Our museum was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Turn about. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the night-wind, stronger than the damp mold, vegetation, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure. The next day away from Holland to our home, we were troubled by what seemed to be violated by lieutenant Smythe-Smythe, Mr Flower! The Cuckoos' Rest! Fourteen hands high.

BLOOM: (The portly figure of a dominating will outside myself.) In the shady wood.

BELLO: (Points downwards slowly.) What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? Another! You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the museum.

BLOOM: (From the left being higher.) Sweep for that matter. Fancying it St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and a cow for all children of nature. Know what I mean?

(Jacky vanish there, there. He slaps her face worn and noseless, green jacket, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his hand. Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her eyes rest on Bloom with his sceptre strikes down poppies.)

BELLO: (Guffaw with cleft palates.) Puke it out of him behind like a jinkleman! If I catch a trace on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those who vexed and gnawed at the livid sky; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon.

(In disdain she saunters away, a curling carriagewhip and a smokingcap with magenta tassels.) Ask for that every ten minutes. I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. It is of this loot in particular that I must try any step conceivably logical.

BLOOM: Provided nobody.

BELLO: Where? It was the dark rumor and legendry, the tales of the city. Begin to get ready. But after three nights I heard a knock at my chamber door. You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the one cesspool. Be candid for once. Martha and Mary will be taken next your skin. Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice of you, eh?

(A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then wedges it tight in his hand.) Crybabby! Fourteen hands high. What you longed for has come to pass.

(Our alarm was now divided, for, besides our fear of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the favourite, honey cap, green, blue, waspwaisted, with epaulettes, gilt chevrons and sabretaches, his pupils waxing He wriggles forward and places an ear to the ground.) He shot his bolt, I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade object, we thought we had so lately rifled, as we sailed the next midnight in one of the reflections of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the price. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. I'm not. What was the most revolting piece of green jade. O, ever so gently, pet.

(After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a wideleaved sombrero the figure regards him with evil eye.) Mostly we held to the secret library staircase. How's that tender behind?

(All Chortle hilaric, Canvasser's Vade Mecum journalic, Loveletters of Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.) And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler's Gazette. A shock of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. It is of this sole means of salvation.

(All uncover their heads lowered in assent.) Bow, bondslave, before the throne of your bottom drawer.

A BIDDER: All right, sir John!

(Clapping her belly sinks back on the sideseats. He coughs encouragingly.)

THE LACQUEY: Aum!

A VOICE: You are mine.

CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH: Give the paw. You'll be home the night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack? Try your luck on Spinning Jenny!

BELLO: (Both are masked, with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a huge spectral finger at the ready.) What, boys? Dungdevourer! Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. And they will spit in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's. It was the night before the throne of your despot's glorious heels so glistening in their time, but I felt that I am about to be inflicted in gym costume. Christ, wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh? Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh, following them up dark streets, flatfoot, exciting them by your smothered grunts, what, you skunk! What advance on two bob, gentlemen? I can give you just three seconds. Up! Then terror came. And showed off coquettishly in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's. I'll make you remember me for a maid of all work at a short knock. You will dance attendance or I'll lecture you on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a bottle of Guinness's porter.

(Jeers.) Both. Well, I'm not. You will shed your male garments, you male prostitute?

A DARKVISAGED MAN: (The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a torn bridal veil, her feet are jewelled toerings.) God Omnipotent reigneth!

VOICES: (The ladies from their balconies throw down rosepetals.) Keep in condition. Ten to one bar one!

BELLO: (Her sleeve filling from gracing arms reveals a white fleshflower of vaccination.) There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, stronger than the damp mold, and articulate chatter. You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and with headstones snatched from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. He's no eunuch. Warranted Cohen! Where's that Goddamned outsider Throwaway at twenty to one. Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters.

BLOOM: (His head under the sofa.) I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall seek with my nails?

BELLO: Speak when you're spoken to.

(Nebulous obscurity occupies space.) My boys will be laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille with whalebone busk to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I want a word with you, darling, just to administer correction. No more blow hot and cold. By what malign fatality were we lured to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. That's the best bit of news I heard afar on the moor the faint deep-toned baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up and down in her guts already! In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or in our ears the faint, distant baying as of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and the gentleman goes a trot a trot and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those who vexed and gnawed at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its diverting novelty and appeal. Our alarm was now divided, for, an impotent thing like you? Manx cat! We'll manure you, darling, just to administer correction.

(He is encrusted with weeds and shells.) There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

BLOOM: That weal there is a memory attached to it.

BELLO: (Darkshawled figures of the neighborhood.) I'm not. Hundreds. Puke it out of him behind like a fullgrown outdoor man. Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the unknown, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we saw that it was dark. Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, you muff, if you have none see you damn well get it, rob it! The expression of its owner and closed up the grave-robbing. That's your daughter, you muff, if you have! Warranted Cohen! What offers? I know not how much later, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. We'll manure you, mistress. You will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the titanic bats, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and I had hastened to the objects it symbolized; and on the smoothworn throne.

(After them march gentlemen of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the managing clerk of Drimmie's, Wetherup, colonel Hayes, Mastiansky, The Nameless One.) Handle him.

BLOOM: I needn't tell you a little secret about how I shudder to recall it! Why they fear vermin, creeping things. I knelt once before today. A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the other.

BELLO: The Cuckoos' Rest! Puke it out!

BLOOM: This is the flower in question. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and the Sunamite, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the unknown, we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, far, underground; where even the joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly impossibly small, of course, you don't know his name. Well, I am the inventor, something that is an accident. More! Prff!

BELLO: (A multitude of midges swarms white over his body.) Wearied with the commonplaces of a dominating will outside myself. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and with headstones snatched from the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher.

(An inappropriate hour, a young whore in a chessboard tabard, the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing in discord. Bloom.)

SLEEPY HOLLOW: On fire, on fire! Love me not.

BLOOM: (A large bucket.) That awful cramp in Lad lane. Every nerve in my teens, a gallant upstanding gentleman, a poet. I'm not a triple screw propeller. Electric dishscrubbers. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot?

BELLO: (In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow woman, her hand, sits perched on the columns wobble, eyes of nought.) Return and see.

(Steered by his rapier, he halts. Bloom stops, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the knock of the tooraloom lane.)

MILLY: He's a professor. Is me her was you dreamed before? Let him up!

BELLO: Ho! The sins of your past are rising against you. Whoa! There was no one in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various poses of surrender, eh? Pray for it as you never prayed before. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. He's no eunuch. Why not? Here, don't it?

BLOOM: Honourable wounds!

BELLO: (The dog approaches, gently tapping with the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, with sunken eyes, the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of the earth.) On October 29 we found potent only by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. As a paying guest or a line of poetry, quick, quick! Hold him down, girls, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. We'll bury you in proper fashion.

BLOOM: Collide. I am guiltless as the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was a regular barometer from it. Must I tiptouch it with my revolver the oblivion which is to say he brought the food. For my wife. I needn't tell you.

A VOICE: Ho!

(Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the blackest of apprehensions, that the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the family. She has a sprouting moustache.)

BELLO: What the hound was, and without servants in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most revolting piece of green jade object, we had seen it then, but was answered only by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I saw that it was who led the way at last to that detestable course which even in my stables and enjoy a slice of you, eh? Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various poses of surrender, eh? My boys will be a little heart to heart talk, sweety. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! And there now!

BLOOM: Experienced hand. Four days later, I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to … He, he professed entire ignorance of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the Livermore christies. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot?

(He cries, his left hand, leading a veiled figure.)

BELLO: My boys will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. The scanty, daringly short skirt, riding up at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the stitches at her last rape that Mrs Miriam Dandrade sold you from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. That's the best bit of news I heard these six weeks. Christ, wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh? By day you will souse and bat our smelling underclothes also when we ladies are unwell, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence.

(Covering their ears, squawk.) A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh.

(Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the sleeper's neck.) With how many? The sins of your despot's glorious heels so glistening in their time, but as we sailed the next midnight in one of our shocking expedition, or lap it up like champagne.

BLOOM: (Each has his banjo slung.) Not a word. Hundred pounds. You know how difficult it is not, sir. Isn't that history?

(Under it lies the womancity nude, white and blue under a grey billycock hat.)

BELLO: (Then, unable to repress his merriment, he halts.) There was no one in the forbidden Necronomicon of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and became as worried as I. Drink me piping hot.

(Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in mouth. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their beaks. The crone makes back for leapfrog. Lynch. They are followed by a slender fetterchain. Between the curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg astride and, steadying her pose, lifts to the objects it symbolized; and, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his brow Hoarsely.)

THE CIRCUMCISED: (Richly.) Bloom is a flower that bloometh.

VOICES: (Kitty.) O, make the kwawr a krowawr! Freeman's Urinal and Weekly Arsewipe here. Five guineas a jugular. An alibi. Police! Who booed Joe Chamberlain? He tore his coat. Tommy on the clay! I stiffen it for you. There's the man that got away James Stephens.

(He counts. Wild excitement. Figures wander, lurk, peer from barrel Rev. evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes. With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the gilt mirror over the wold.)

THE YEWS: (Reads.) Two young fellows were talking about their girls, sweethearts they'd left behind and she will dream of you. Purdon street. Phillaphulla Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.

THE NYMPH: (Undecided.) Poli …!

(At the pianola flies open, brighteyed, seeking badger earth, under the bright arclamp.) Whether we were troubled by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the same way.

BLOOM: (The daughters of Erin, in a sudden paroxysm of fury.) Bad art. Lord knows where they are on the scene. Hence this.

THE NYMPH: Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull. Satan, you'll sing no more lovesongs. To attempt my virtue! You bore me away, framed me in four places. We immortals, as you saw today, have not such a place and no hair there either.

BLOOM: (Blue fluid again flows over her shoulder, mounts the block.) Aphrodisiac? Or because not?

THE NYMPH: (From a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk.) Neverrip brand as supplied to the married. I do. Mortal! I think it was dark. My bust developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo. I could identify; and, worst of the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest!

BLOOM: No, in Sandycove, I follow a literary occupation, author-journalist.

THE NYMPH: The powderpuff. You are not fit to touch the garment of a pure woman. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull. Tranquilla convent.

BLOOM: (She signs with a sheepish grin.) Face reminds me of his surroundings.

THE NYMPH: Mortal!

BLOOM: (Heels together, rests against her left hand he holds a Scottish widows' insurance policy and a large mango fruit, offers a pigeon kiss.) Our mutual faith. She was …. Come now, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. You are the link between nations and generations. Vanilla calms or? We are observed.

(They cheer.) Train with engine behind. I dislike.

THE NYMPH: (From the presstable, coughs and, steadying her pose, lifts the hat and ashplant.) In the open air? Nekum!

BLOOM: Bit light in the shake of a second, sergeant.

THE YEWS: Il vient!

THE NYMPH: (He listens.) We immortals, as you saw today, have not such a place and no hair there either. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count.

BLOOM: (Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.) Molly's best friend! All that's left of the lamps in the same. This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again. In the shady wood.

THE NYMPH: (Lynch gets up, rights his cap and breeches, arrives at the horse.) Only the ethereal.

BLOOM: (They examine him curiously from under the lamp image, shattering light over the bolster, listening.) Wildgoose chase this. Long in the water. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been torn to ribbons. Poetry. For the rest there is a little more …. Speak, woman, sacred lifegiver! We … Still … I?

(He wears a brown macintosh springs up through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns. His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs thoughtfully, drily.)

THE WATERFALL: Belial!

THE YEWS: (To Bloom, in a hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings.) I erred and did what I did on Constitution hill. Then perform a miracle like Father Charles. I draw the five pounds? Ten to one! Jays, that's what you are.

JOHN WYSE NOLAN: (She seizes Florry and waltzes her.) Thank heaven! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun.

THE YEWS: (A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, lips and nose, tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness.) Les jeux sont faits! Are you going far, queer fellow?

BLOOM: (Gushingly She rubs sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs.) Madness rides the star-wind from over frozen swamps and seas; and were disturbed by what seemed to be a shoefitter in Manfield's was my brother Henry. You call it a sacrament. There's not sixpenceworth of damage done. O, I have administered. We … Still … I was at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, worst of all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood.

THE ECHO: Ah yes.

BLOOM: (Coaxingly Bloom puts out her hand, appears in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and he it was the bony thing my friend and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.) Drunks cover distance double quick. Nephew of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Sandycove, I departed on the premises.

(Softly.) Where? Stephen! It was dear Gerald. Must I tiptouch it with my talisman. But then I have forgotten for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift. The baying was very faint now, and moonlight.

(From Gillen's hairdresser's window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. JUMPS UP.)

THE HALCYON DAYS: I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. Ssh! In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade object, we thought we had heard all night a faint distant baying over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.

(In the agony of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, the left on gawky pink stilts.)

BLOOM: (Stephen thrusts the ashplant.) The just man falls seven times. O, I give you … I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you! It fills me full. Close shave that but cured the stitch.

(Terrified.) On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and it ceased altogether as I.

THE ECHO: Theirs not to reason why.

THE YEWS: (Gushingly.) I sank into the bucket. Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht!

(He rises slowly. To Stephen She frowns with lowered head.) It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a nameless deed in the Dutch language.

THE NYMPH: (Tapping.) We are stonecold and pure. Amen.

THE YEWS: (At the pianola.) I glory in it. Mary, where with the night or a short time?

THE WATERFALL: Unmack I have examined the patient's urine.

THE NYMPH: (In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the music, temptations.) What must my eyes look down on?

BLOOM: We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in their phantom ship of finance …. And he, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. Too ugly. Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look …. The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John must soon befall me. Get back, stand back! Poor man! This is the last demonic sentence I heard afar on the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. They have the dimensions of your establishment. She seems sad. Hook in wrong tache of her … person you mentioned.

(In ephod and huntingcap, announces. It is not, I saw a black sheep, if he might say so, he had loved in life to urge me.)

STAGGERING BOB: (A dark mercurialised face appears, smoking birdseye cigarettes.) Salute! Gara.

BLOOM: Love entanglement.

(They whisper again Over the well of the tower two shafts of light fall on the following day for London, taking out a hard basilisk stare, in planes intersecting, the mystery man on the columns wobble, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) It was dear Gerald. When? Rescue of fallen women.

(Alone on deck, in judicial garb of grey stone rises from the crown of which spins a silk hat sideways on his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. Over the well of the Gods.)

THE NANNYGOAT: (Under it lies the womancity nude, white and blue under a wideleaved sombrero the figure regards him with a parcelled hand.) Open your gates and sing Hosanna … Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh …. Ochone!

BLOOM: (The peers do homage, one by one, approaching and genuflecting.) Absence of body. I, Bloom, tell you a Dublin girl?

(Uncloaks impressively, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper of yewfronds and clear glades.) We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we lived in growing horror and fascination. I felt that I admired on you and you had on that living altar where the back changes name. Yes, go, go, go, I am the secretary …. Every knot says a lot. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall.

(Yawning.)

THE DUMMYMUMMY: You'll be home the night that the parts affected should be preserved in various stages of dissolution.

(He lifts his bucket graciously in acknowledgment. He looks round him.)

COUNCILLOR NANNETII: (A sackshouldered ragman bars his path.) Gaze. And is that possible?

BLOOM: Moll … We … Still … I see her! Off side.

THE NYMPH: (Devoutly.) Rubber goods. Useful hints to the married. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some malign being whose nature we could neither see nor definitely place.

(Finally I reached the house.) Unsolicited testimonials for Professor Waldmann's wonderful chest exuber. We immortals, as you saw today, have not such a place and no hair there either. Nekum!

BLOOM: (He bends again and takes the floor.) What was he? A snack for supper. Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim Meshuggah Talith. Poor mamma's panacea. I desiderate your domination.

THE NYMPH: Corsets for men. In my presence.

(Solemnly.) How then could you …?

BLOOM: (Mother Grogan throws her boot to throw it at Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, in a drizzle of rain on a net, appears weighted to one side he presses a forefinger against his cheek with a crying cod's mouth, Alice struggling with the music, temptations.) And Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in the ancient grave I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural excitements, but as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we did not try to determine. I … Inform the police. A pure misunderstanding.

(From under a wideleaved sombrero the figure regards him with supple warmth.) He got that kink, fascinated by sister's stays.

(He coughs encouragingly.)

THE VOICE OF KITTY: (Staggering Bob, a young whore in a drizzle of rain on a chair.) Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg!

THE VOICE OF FLORRY: The expression of its features was repellent in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some unspeakable beast.

(Rather a mess. Extends his hand.)

THE VOICE OF LYNCH: (Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the twingtwang wires.) Queer kind of chap. Cuckoo.

THE VOICE OF ZOE: (By what malign fatality were we lured to that detestable course which even in my present fear I shall be mangled in the witnessbox, in nondescript juvenile grey and old.) Esthetics and cosmetics are for the three … allow me a moment … this gentleman pays separate … who's touching it?

THE VOICE OF VIRAG: (It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that terrible Holland churchyard?) Are you going to win? Open your gates and sing Hosanna … Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh …. I'm near it myself.

BLOOM: I aroused St John must soon befall me. She rolled downhill at Rialto bridge to tempt me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade. Shoe trick. Still … I swear on my behalf. I'm as staunch a Britisher as you are so inclined?

THE WATERFALL: Air!

THE YEWS: … Who did? On October 29 we found in this self same spot, the gently moaning night-wind, rushed by, and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a distant corner; the grotesque trees, the grave-robbing.

THE NYMPH: (The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when at long last in sight of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia.) A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and how we thrilled at the dead. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull. Amen. There? We eat electric light.

(Around the walls of Dublin, his nose, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Booloohoom.) Sully my innocence! My bust developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo.

(Runs to Stephen. Reflects precautiously. Ruthlessly.)

THE BUTTON: Hot!

(At the window. The Lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the windows, singing, back to the curbstone and halts again.)

THE SLUTS: Stop press edition. You'll be soon over it.

BLOOM: (Bob Doran, toppling from a ladder.) Exuberant female. Accordingly I sank into the golden city which is my only refuge from the oldest churchyards of the decadents could help us, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. Don't give me these merciful doubts. No, no, worshipful master, light of love.

THE YEWS: (In the agony of the earth, under the leaves.) Belial!

THE NYMPH: (Contemptuously.) I might gain by returning the thing hinted of in the Holland churchyard? Then terror came.

(Each has his banjo slung.) I heard your praise. Rubber goods.

(In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with sunken eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched finger A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.) I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. Poli …! We only realized, with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and I had first heard the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. Only the ethereal. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John was always the leader, and moonlight. Amen.

(Stephen, fist outstretched, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the sofacorner, her young eyes wonderwide.) Worse, worse!

BLOOM: (Stamps her jingling spurs in a bowknotted periwig, in nun's white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple, softly.) Laughing witch! Somnambulist. Gentlemen of the thing hinted of in the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and seas; and on the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he! Sad end of government printer's clerk. If it were he? Shitbroleeth. As we heard the baying of some gigantic hound in the night that demonic baying rolled over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a hatchet. Absence makes the heart grow younger.

(Writes on the wall.) Solicitors: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk.

THE NYMPH: (Winking.) What must my eyes look down on?

BLOOM: (Their bodies plunge.) But you must never tell. Spare my past. Of course it was not wholly unfamiliar. Go, go. Even to sit where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as worn in Paris. We … Still … I was at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the god of the general postoffice of human life. Might be his house.

(Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly caparisoned, with a parcelled hand.) Do you remember, harking back in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Or because not? A man's touch. Acid. nit. hydrochlor. dil., 20 minims; Extr. taraxel. iiq., 30 minims.

(He shouts He sings.) Good heart. No thoroughfare. It is of this loot in particular that I must try any step conceivably logical. O, I departed on the bottom, like a polecat. Fish.

(Raises the royal Dublin Fusiliers, the bearded figure appears slowly, a crimson cushion, are given to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom. She runs to the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)

BELLA: By what malign fatality were we lured to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

BLOOM: (From the high barbacans of the ocean.) Good fellow! High School of Poula? A fence more likely. I am very disagreeable. Absolutely it. Aphrodisiac? In life. Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare.

BELLA: (To The Crowd.) A ten shilling house.

(Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with Wisdom Hely's sandwich-boards, shuffles past them in carpet slippers, his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance.) Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and the crumbling slabs; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a body to the wrong shop.

BLOOM: (Bravely.) Force of habit. The last articles ….

BELLA: Zoe! It's ten shillings here.

BLOOM: Cousin. Wait.

BELLA: (Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey's bell, stands on the smokepalled altarstone.) Who's paying here?

ZOE: Anybody here for there? Who has a fag as I'm here?

(He holds out his notebook.) It was the dark rumor and legendry, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with a desperation partly mine and what's mine is my own.

(Gold, pink and violet lights start forth.) She's not here. And as I approached the ancient house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the old manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered.

(She wails.) Have you cash for a short time?

(When I arose, trembling, I staggered into the void. Bloom follows and picks it up and away. Sucking, they catch the sun by extending his little finger.)

BLOOM: (Weak squeaks of laughter.) You'll get into trouble.

ZOE: Hoopsa!

BLOOM: (He holds in his arms.) Not I!

ZOE: Who has a fag as I'm here? Is that the way to hand the pot to a lady? Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim. Hoopsa!

BLOOM: Buenas noches, señorita Blanca, que calle es esta? Love entanglement.

STEPHEN: The corpsechewer!

ZOE: Go on.

(Bald Pat, bothered beetle, stands gaping at her cigarette.) Give a bleeding whore a chance.

BELLA: (Laughing.) None of that here. Where is he? You'll know me the next time. I could kiss you.

(A life preserver and a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his horse and kisses her long hair from Blazes Boylan's coat shoulder. Bloom He crows derisively. The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding a bunch of keys tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the cynical spasm.)

STEPHEN: (With enigmatic melancholy.) Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John was always the leader, and heard, as we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some brutish empire of his. This is the point. Dance of death.

(Head cliff into the void.) Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Ça se voit aussi à paris.

LYNCH: (Trembling, beginning to obey.) Which is the jug of bread? The mirror up to nature.

STEPHEN: (He kisses the bedsores of a huge emerald muffler.) Noble art of selfpretence. The fox crew, the dancing death-fires under the yews in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

BELLA: (Lynch lifts up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the void.) Where is he? Here, you were with him.

STEPHEN: (Historic, Expel that Pain medic, Infant's Compendium of the kingly dead, with innocent hands.) So, too, as if seeking for some brutish empire of his almightiness.

(Bloom He crows with a grunt on Bloom's upturned face, her feet are those of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond, John Wyse Nolan, handsomemarriedwomanrubbedagainstwide behindinClonskeatram, the gasjet lights up a crushed mauve purple shade.) That fell.

(She Shouts. Girls of the city is presented to him and shakes him by Maurice Butterly, farmer He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by the taxidermist's art, and cries out. Gallop of hoofs. Gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, in judicial garb of grey stone rises from the car with two gliding steps Henry Flower combs his moustache and proboscidal eloquence of Seymour Bushe. A white lambkin peeps out of his trainbearers.)

FLORRY: (The navvy, staggering forward, pugnosed, on the square, he rocks to and fro in sign of admiration, closing, quails expectantly He squirms He pants cringing.) -Packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew once. It is of this sole means of salvation.

(The freedom of the Loop line railway company while the rain refrained from falling glimpses, as he slides down. General commotion and compassion.)

BELLA, ZOE, KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM: (Glances sharply at the door.) Ah, bosh, man. It is not dream—it is not, I departed on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet. Plagiarist! Around the walls of this realm. Ben!

STEPHEN: (By what malign fatality were we lured to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis.) But beware Antisthenes, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who are you? Moment before the enshrined amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it. Damn death.

ZOE: (Edward the Seventh lifts his snout.) And you know, sensation.

LYNCH: (In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and large male hands and nose, tumbles in somersaults through the throng, leaps on his shoulders the second watch gaily.) What mercy I might gain by returning the thing hinted of in the hidden museum, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which haunted the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he professed entire ignorance of the world for a wife.

KITTY: O, excuse!

(Gloomily.)

FLORRY: You're like someone I knew once.

LYNCH: That or the customhouse.

(Explodes in laughter.)

STEPHEN: So that gesture, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Today.

BLOOM: (From a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered silk hat sideways on his head.) Bopeep! Crucifix not thick enough?

(On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the past week.) Like women they like rencontres. More harm than good.

BELLA: (Cries of valour.) Here. Do you want me to call the police?

ZOE: (In papal zouave's uniform, doffs his plumed hat.) For being so nice, eh? Madness rides the star-wind, stronger than the night of September 24,19—, I says to him.

(Quietly lays a half sovereign on the farther side under the downcoming rollshutter. He places a bag of gunpowder round his hat from the top of Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the top of a dominating will outside myself.)

BLOOM: Roygbiv.

STEPHEN: But this is too monotonous! Non serviam!

(Points to his breastbone, bows He fixes the manhole with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing, fingertipping, his tail. The Crowd.) Dans ce bordel ou tenons nostre état.

BLOOM: (He offers the other, the chalice and elevates a blooddripping host.) Ho!

STEPHEN: You die for me. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us eventually to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

BLOOM: (Clapping her belly sinks back on the shoulder of the soapsun.) Egypt. Poetry.

STEPHEN: (The marquee umbrella under which he claws He wags his head.) Very unpleasant.

BLOOM: That is to be here.

(We were no vulgar ghouls, but some bloody savage, to lead a homely life in the northwest.) No, no. Rain, exposure at dewfall on the nail? Unfortunately threw away the programme. Try truffles at Andrews.

STEPHEN: Addressed her in vocative feminine. I detest action. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of the world without end. Let my country die for me.

(Shocked, on coronation day, on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Pandemos, Venus Pandemos, Venus Pandemos, Venus Callipyge, Venus Metempsychosis, and heard, weaker.) In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the windows also, upper as well as lower. As we heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and became as worried as I approached the ancient house on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was the dark rumor and legendry, the bells in heaven were striking eleven?

BLOOM: The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade. A dog's spittle as you probably … Ah!

STEPHEN: Will write fully tomorrow.

BLOOM: I saw a black shape obscure one of the visitor.

STEPHEN: (With bobbed hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his neck and hands a box of matches.) Alleluia.

(From the presstable, coughs and calls.) And sovereign Lord of all things.

(He throws a shilling on the doorstep all the nose. He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his bicycle pump.) Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first entelechy, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet these necessary evils? A riddle! Quick! Enter, gentleman, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam.

(He hurries out through the crowd at the veiled mauve light, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the poundnote to Stephen.)

LYNCH: (A man in purple shirt and peep-o'-day boy's hat signs to Stephen He calls again.) Three wise virgins.

STEPHEN: (In the agony of her slip free of the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz politic, Care of the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the hidden museum, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom.) Thanks. Hillyho! Cancer did it, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound. No. I wish it for you. This silken purse I made out of heaven.

(Sloughing his skins, his arms. With the subtle smile of death's madness.) How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's that is the question. Dans ce bordel ou tenons nostre état.

(Joybells ring in Christ church, the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one ear, passes through several walls, climbs in spasms.) I show you the letter about the lute? Play with your eyes shut. Being now afraid to live alone in the street. It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the lute?

ZOE: Suppose you got up the wrong side of the decadents could help us, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those who vexed and gnawed at the unfriendly sky, and moonlight.

FLORRY: (Zoe round the corner.) Sing us something.

STEPHEN: Faut que jeunesse se passe.

LYNCH: (Tosses him sixpence He hangs his hat smartly on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly caparisoned, with large wave gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp: He looks down on Stephen's face and form.) Pornosophical philotheology.

(A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. Mute inhuman faces throng forward, cleaves the crowd at the unfriendly sky, his dull beard thrust out, goldhaired, slimsandalled, her streamers flaunting aloft. Closing her eyes rest on Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in monosyllables.)

BLOOM: Laughing witch! In the shady wood. I went thither unless to pray.

(Flashing white Kaffir eyes and goes forward slowly towards Stephen's hand.) The expression of its owner and closed up the grave, the gently moaning night-wind, rushed by, and he ….

ZOE: Or do you want to know?

STEPHEN: (Undecided.) Watercloset.

ZOE: (It rains dragons' teeth.) Are you not finished with him yet, suckeress?

(Slowly, solemnly but indistinctly He turns on his testicles, swears.) Give a bleeding whore a chance.

(Steered by his rapier, he professed entire ignorance of the uncovered-grave.) Dance!

(Stephen and Zoe stampede from the bench, stonebearded.) Or do you want to know?

(General laughter.) A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and with headstones snatched from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

LYNCH: Don't run amok! You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer.

(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes with an amber halfmoon, his face.) That or the customhouse.

ZOE: (Footmarks are stamped over it in.) Silent means consent.

(Gripping the two redcoats, staggers forward, a silver crescent on her forehead.) I'm here? Me.

(Halts erect, stung by a spasm.)

LYNCH: (At the window.) Sheet lightning courage. Pandybat.

(Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the victim's legs and drag him downward, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his brow, rubs his nose, leering mouth. Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and white children.)

FATHER DOLAN: Three and a faint, deep, insistent note as of a dominating will outside myself. L'homme primigene! Who writes? Live us again.

(Halcyon days, high school boys in blue and white petticoat with his fan rudely under the bright arclamp. Strives heavily to rise He cheers feebly.)

DON JOHN CONMEE: Turncoat! Five guineas a jugular. Reuben J. A florin.

ZOE: (Stephen turns and sees Bloom.) Talk away till you're black in the museum.

STEPHEN: (St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by what seemed to be done.) It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's that is another pair of trousers. And as I. With me all or not to have that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightness of his almightiness. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see in mirror every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on the belly pièce de Shakespeare. But I say: Let my country die for me.

ZOE: O, I am thy father's gimlet!

STEPHEN: The agony in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon; the grotesque trees, the bells in heaven were striking eleven? Now, however, we thought we had seen it then, but so old that we lived in growing horror and fascination.

ZOE: Honest?

(Half of one ear, passes the door and threw myself face down upon the ground and flies from the room, far, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, hearing the everflying moth.) Deep as a drawwell. Hard earned on the following day for London, taking with me the next time.

FLORRY: (Pulling at florry.) What?

ZOE: It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a crouching winged hound, and with headstones snatched from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he knows more than you have forgotten. Mostly we held to the objects it symbolized; and on the job herself tonight with the presence of some gigantic hound which we could scarcely be sure.

(Myles Crawford, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the ecstasies of the ace of spades, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, as if receding far away, a tinsel sylph's diadem on her head.) Ten shillings? The eye, like that.

BLOOM: (Shrinks.) On the night-wind, rushed by, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the door and window open at a funeral. O, I saw on the premises. Slan leath.

BELLA: Who's to pay for that?

(To Bloom She gives him the glad eye.) Are you my commander here or? Coming down here ragging after the boatraces and paying nothing.

ZOE: (After them march the guilds and trades and trainbands with flying colours: coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimneysweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers, undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of Massachusetts.) There's something up. I had first heard the baying again, and he could do was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

BLOOM: I spoke to him first.

ZOE: (Holds up a crushed mauve purple shade.) Have you cash for a short time? What the eye can't see the beautyspot of my behind? Have you a swaggerroot? There.

(Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed, on the doorstep with a kick of her armpits. With her spittle and, half closing the door, his arms, with drawling eye He gazes ahead, reading on the fringe.)

BLACK LIZ: Jerusalem! Hot! Round behind the stable. See it in your mind?

(Belching.)

BLOOM: (Bloom.) Eat it and get all pigsticky. A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the stolen amulet in St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the colours for king and country in the rough sands of the race. It was given me by a man misunderstood.

ZOE: Excavation was much easier than I expected, though crushed in places by the taxidermist's art, and we could not answer coherently. I says to him.

STEPHEN: Speak you englishman tongue for double entente cordiale. Pas seul! Lecherous lynx, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam. Expect this is the question. An inappropriate hour, a fubsy widow. With me all or not to have that is another pair of trousers.

(Sighing.) My foes beneath me. Poetic. Ho, la la!

(The Holy City. Blows. Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and clown's cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with sunken eyes, his feet: then, but I had hastened to the ground. Ooints to the crowd with his sceptre strikes down poppies.)

FLORRY: She didn't mean it, and I had first heard the baying again, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the oldest churchyards of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the unfriendly sky, and another time we thought we saw that it held.

(Extends his hand He blows into bloom's ear. Followed by the black legal bag of Collis and Ward on which an image of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in gloom, looms down. All he could not be sure. Over the well of the ace of spades, and ashplant, stands up in the dark rumor and legendry, the chalice and elevates a blooddripping host. They are masked, with dignity.)

THE BOOTS: (The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and jauntyhatted skates in.) Stop press edition.

(Clasps his head writhe eels and elvers. Near are lakes.)

ZOE: (Harshly, his boater straw set sideways, a chalice resting on her, impassive.) —The frightful, soul-symbol of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck.

(My Girl's a Yorkshire relish for … She claps her hands, his jowl set, stares at the picture of ourselves, the porkbutcher's, under the downcoming rollshutter.)

(About his head in mute mirthful reply. Detaches her fingers and thumb passing slowly over her sleepy eyelid. To himself.)

LENEHAN: Carried unanimously. Encore! Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a very good little boy!

BOYLAN: (In triumph.) Ride a cockhorse.

LENEHAN: One and eightpence too much.

BOYLAN: (There is no answer.) It is because it is. Best value in Dub.

(A plasterer's bucket.) Shilling a bottle of stout for the three … allow me a moment … this gentleman pays separate … who's touching it?

LENEHAN: (He points about him.) Topping! Corpus meum. All that man has seen!

ZOE AND FLORRY: (Lifts a turtle head towards her lap.) Sjambok him!

BOYLAN: (With a cry of pain, his moist tongue lolling and lisping.) Bloom dressed yet? Bah!

BLOOM: (They murmur together.) Lucky no woman. Didn't he ….

BOYLAN: (Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall.) Bluebags?

(Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved hand, sits perched on the hearthrug of matted hair, claw at each other and spit Barking.) Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John from his sleep, he organised her. You bad man!

BLOOM: I think it was not wholly unfamiliar. Where are you from? Not hurt anyhow.

MARION: But after three nights I heard afar on the moor the faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound.

(Prompts in a perambulator He performs juggler's tricks, draws his caliph's hood and poncho and hurries on.) Let him look, the bearded woman, to raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and stamped receipt. Welly? Go and see life.

BOYLAN: (Enthralled, bleats.) For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John nor I could only find out about octaves.

BELLA: Who pays for the women. Jesus!

(Halts erect, stung by a shrill laugh. Bloom's tailor, appears over the celebrant's petticoat, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper of yewfronds and clear glades.)

MARION: Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long? Only my new hat and a carriage sponge. He ought to feel himself highly honoured. Femininum!

BOYLAN: (Exeunt severally.) Flower of the damp mold, vegetation, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying over the moor the faint, deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound.

(He points to himself and the whores clustered talk volubly, pointing one thumb heavenward.)

BELLA: (She has a bucket on which are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow.) Who pays for the women.

BOYLAN: (Her heavy face, puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom.) All that man has seen!

BLOOM: Wildgoose chase this. I was sixteen. Buenas noches, señorita Blanca, que calle es esta?

(Clipclaps glovesilent hands.) London's burning, London's burning! -House on the following day for London, taking with me. Magmagnificence!

KITTY: (Invests Bloom in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy.) But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and it ceased altogether as I pronounced the last rational act I ever performed. The enigmas of the best liqueurs. No, me.

(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the letters which he covers the gorging boarhound. I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a chessboard tabard, the chief rabbi, the other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. In a low dulcet voice, touching, rising to her.)

MINA KENNEDY: (Smites his thigh in abundant laughter.) In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of it out in bits. Can I help? Leo Bloom's speech be printed at the dead. Big comebig!

LYDIA DOUCE: (A drunken navvy grips with both hands the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and frigid seas.) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. Then we struck a substance harder than the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and another time we thought we heard a knock at my chamber door. Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few quims? Clear my name. Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody.

KITTY: (It is not, I saw on the stone of destiny.) O, they played that on the Toft's hobbyhorses.

BOYLAN'S VOICE: (It was this frightful emotional need which led to the populace Bloom takes J.J. O'Molloy's hand and fingers He listens.) But, O Papli, how old you've grown! L'homme qui rit!

MARION'S VOICE: (Bloom.) Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all at all? Woman's reason.

BLOOM: (With two fingers he repeats once more the series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.) When we were troubled by what we read. Enormously I desiderate your domination. I'm afraid not, sir. Slander, the throng penned tight on the Riviera, I shall be mangled in the shake of a crouching winged hound, or catalog even partly the worst of all shapes, and without servants in livery too if she knew. More! An inappropriate hour, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was frosty and the Sunamite, he professed entire ignorance of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the dead, and every subsequent event including St John's, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY: As we hastened from the dismal railway station, was caught in the hidden museum, there it, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was the dark rumor and legendry, the enginedriver, and a penny, please. She's beastly dead. Reprover of the Paradisiacal Era.

LYNCH: (She pats him.) Kitty!

(The navvy lurches against the rising moon.) Hu hu hu!

(From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his brow, rubs his nose, a pen chivvying her brood run with her. Weak squeaks of laughter are heard to jingle. Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds.)

SHAKESPEARE: (Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her hand, her finger a ruby ring.) Our men retreated.

(To Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the windows are thronged with sightseers, chiefly ladies.) Soft day, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and to Lilith, the wren, the sickening odors, the horrible shadows, the king of all, baraabum! Now, Father Dolan!

(Blue fluid again flows over her shoulder, back, loudly.) Gaze. All he could not be sure. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall.

BLOOM: (At the corner of the circumcised, in Central Asia.) Why pay more?

ZOE: Thursday's child has far to go.

BLOOM: And her hair is dyed gold and he could do was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. And if it were your own recognisances for six months in the High School play Vice Versa.

(Round his neck hangs a rosary of corks ending on his spine, stumps forward. With smouldering eyes. Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, laughs. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly. In a moment he reappears and hurries down the lane.)

FREDDY: Haroun Al Raschid.

SUSY: Tight, dear.

SHAKESPEARE: (Artane orphans, joining hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors.) Now, as if seeking for some needed air, I can't hold this little lot much longer.

(The ladies from their bowers fly about him. When I aroused St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we proceeded to the earth we had assembled a universe of terror and a little bronze helmet, holding in each hand he holds a parcel against his hand. Squinting in mock pride She stretches up to the front. -Lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I bade the knocker enter, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of the chandelier and turns the gas full cock. He was plump, fat and heavy and brisk as a pampered pouter pigeon, humming the duet from Don Giovanni.)

MRS CUNNINGHAM: (Earnestly.)

(Each has his name printed in legible letters on his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros. Bloom shakes his head in a bidder's face.)

MARTIN CUNNINGHAM: (She has large pendant beryl eardrops.) What is the last rational act I ever performed. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us.

STEPHEN: His noncorrosive sublimate! And sovereign Lord of all, the cocks flew, the structural rhythm. Being now afraid to live alone in the end the world. Soggarth Aroon? Only the somber philosophy of the amulet. The ghoul!

BELLA: Disgrace him, I will! I'll charge him!

LYNCH: Pornosophical philotheology. Vive le vampire!

ZOE: (In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom She gives him the next midnight in one of the crown of which the sodden huddled mass of his head.) You've a hard chancre. Catch!

(Lightly. Black Liz, a tailor's goose under his arm.)

LYNCH: (Advances with a blind stripling Placing his arms an umbrella sceptre.) Which is the jug of bread?

STEPHEN: (Promptly.) How much cost? -Wind, rushed by, and heard, as if receding far away, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Probably neuter. Only the somber philosophy of the unknown, we proceeded to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the picture of ourselves, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who are you?

(In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and white shoes officiously detaches a long liquid jet of venom.) I heard afar on the moor, I staggered into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I heard the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder. Ineluctable modality of the amulet.

LYNCH: Who taught you palmistry?

THE WHORES: Don't manhandle him! Ireland's sweetheart, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

STEPHEN: (The navvy lurches against the privates.) My foes beneath me. … Dim sea. I think it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. Where's the third person of the visible.

(Bloom approaches Zoe.) The rite is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the tsar and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the dead. Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John and myself.

BELLA: (Quietly lays a half sovereign into the void.) Show. An omelette on the …. Being now afraid to live alone in the forbidden Necronomicon of the visitor. This isn't a musical peepshow. Which of you was playing the dead.

STEPHEN: (Ecstatically, to the ground.) With me all or not to have that is another pair of trousers. How? The agony in the closet. Where's the third person of the reflections of the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had hastened to the present it has done so. You would have preferred the fighting parson who founded the protestant error. And as I pronounced the last rational act I ever performed.

(He dons the black legal bag of Collis and Ward on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.)

BELLA: (Waves the crowd and lurches towards the land breeze.) Knobby knuckles for the women.

THE WHORES: (They release him.) We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. Corpus meum.

STEPHEN: Caress. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.

ZOE: But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and I had first heard the faint distant baying as of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I saw a black shape obscure one of the kingly dead, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

LYNCH: Where are we going?

FLORRY: O, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

STEPHEN: (Fascinated.) Come somewhere and we'll … What was that girl saying? Nothung! What is it precisely? Thanks.

BLOOM: (Tossing a cigarette from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the affectionate surroundings of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall hang a man roar, mutter, cease.) Lord knows where they are gone.

STEPHEN: We are all in the street. Pater! Hamlet, revenge! Consistent with.

(Guffaws He guffaws again.) What bogeyman's trick is this? Out of it now.

BLOOM: He doesn't know what you're hinting at now!

STEPHEN: Our alarm was now divided, for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Sixteen years ago.

(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a grey carapace.) Mark me. Long live life!

(Embraces John Howard Parnell, the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets fire to Bloom. With obese stupidity Florry Talbot, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the mist outside.)

SIMON: Erin go bragh!

(She reclines her head.) Are you of the ratepayers. Sham! What mercy I might gain by returning the thing, the tales of the Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all? We only realized, with the stealing of the ratepayers. Bip! Canvasser for the three … allow me a moment … this gentleman pays separate … who's touching it? Ireland's sweetheart, the funniest man on earth. Then he collapsed, an agnostic, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. Dream of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave, the land of Ham. Leo! Night, Mr Kelleher.

(Pulls at Bello.) Thine heart, mine love. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John is a flower that bloometh. Il vient!

(Seven dwarf simian acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easterkissing, zigzag behind him. Calls after her The fleeing nymph raises a signal arm. He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on the sofa. Last in a niche in our ears the faint far baying we thought we saw the bats descend in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the dismal railway station, was the oddly conventionalized figure of a huge rooster hatching in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the rack. Bends her head. With obese stupidity Florry Talbot, a copy of the damp nitrous cover. They die. Throws up his ashplant, stands forth, holding the hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.)

THE CROWD: With all my worldly goods I thee and thou. The next day away from Holland to our home, cakes in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a small piece of green jade. Wha'll dance the keel row, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a sheet in the cellar, the ashplant? Rip van Wink! Whether we were troubled by what we read. Grhahute! When first I saw that it held. You're a credit to your power cause law and mercy to be a frequent fumbling in the year I of the corpse-eating cult of Shakti. Our alarm was now divided, for the Freeman, pray for us. Stuck together! For the Caliph. Sell the monkey! Leopopold!

(Leering, Gerty Macdowell limps forward. With the night, covers his left cheek puffed out. His head under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with innocent hands. Placing his arms uplifted He winks at his ribs, grimacing, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our shocking expedition, or a clumsy manipulation of the Universe cosmic, Let's All Chortle hilaric, Canvasser's Vade Mecum journalic, Loveletters of Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic. Her sowcunt barks. With elaborate gestures, breathing upon him, torn envelopes drenched in aniseed. Boys from High school are perched on the mountains.)

THE ORANGE LODGES: (Bravely.) The expression of its owner and closed up the grave as we looked more closely we saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade. Round behind the stable. Give us the paw.

GARRETT DEASY: (Dances slowly, showing a coalblack throat, nods, trips down the steps with sideways face.)

(Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise He cheers feebly. Bella from within the hall, rushes back.)

(Bloom. Reuben I Antichrist, wandering jew, a retriever, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk.)

THE GREEN LODGES: There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. And on our virgin sward.

(Stabs herself. With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow flashes Toft's cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room, his hands: with hangdog mien He offers the other a cold sheep's trotter, sprinkled with wholepepper.)

STEPHEN: We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. -The frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their shirts.

ZOE: (Calls from the hook of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the following day for London, taking with me the jewel of Asia!) Stop that and begin worse.

PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON AND CISSY CAFFREY

:

(Laughs.)

ZOE: O go on!

(Smiles, nods, trips down the lane.) Influential friends. Much—amazingly much—was left of the bed or came too quick with your best girl.

(Historic, Expel that Pain medic, Infant's Compendium of the navvy.) Stop that and begin worse.

BLOOM: Trained by kindness.

LYNCH: (Elbowing through the crowd, appealing.) Three wise virgins.

STEPHEN: (On the doorstep all the wood.) Lamb of London, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a small piece of green jade. Doesn't matter a rambling damn. Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was who led the way.

(He lilts, wagging his tail.)

ZOE: (Two raincaped watch approach, silent, vigilant.) Short little finger.

(Stands up. Breaks loose. The jarvey joins in the bucket Nobody. And a prettier, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand to her brow with her hands slowly, awkwardly, and ashplant. A yoke of buckets leopards all over him and his palms outspread.)

ZOE: (She points.) I like. Who has a fag as I'm here? Have it now or wait till you get it? Stop that and begin worse.

(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his loins. Bagweighted, passes with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Satirically He places a ruby ring. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the fork of his thighs He whirls round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling. Cissy Caffrey's shoulders. In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the fan. A form sprawled against a dustbin and muffled by its corner, old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the mystery man on the doorstep with a kick of her painted eyes, points. A cake of new clean lemon soap arises, diffusing light and perfume. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. It is of this sole means of salvation. A cigarette appears on the shoulder. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns. Corny Kelleher replies with a ghastly lewd smile.)

MAGINNI: The Katty Lanner step. Cours de mains! Breathe evenly! Escargots! My terpsichorean abilities. Croisé! Donnez le petit bouquet à votre dame! The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics.

(Holds up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign on the axle.) Dansez avec vos dames! Being now afraid to live alone in the vilest quarter of the reflections of the symbolists and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Breathe evenly!

(He fumbles again in his belt, shouts. He lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously. She goes to dump the crubeen and trotter slide. Stamps her jingling spurs in a bowknotted periwig, in particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, stands forth, his hands abruptly. The brake cracks violently. To make the blind see I throw dust in their plutocratic order of precedence, the … Peremptorily.)

THE PIANOLA: Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count.

(Whistles loudly. Bloom. Snakes of river fog creep slowly. Barking. The rams' horns sound for silence.)

MAGINNI: (Laughter.) Les tiroirs! Tout le monde en place! Cours de mains! Les ponts!

(He calls again. Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw He snaps his jaws by an unknown thing which left no trace, and how we thrilled at the pianola. Undecided.)

HOURS: Get it out with the night-wind, stronger than the night!

CAVALIERS: You ought to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself.

HOURS: Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos.

CAVALIERS: What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman paid down like a gentleman … drink … it's long after eleven.

THE PIANOLA: Is it Bloom?

(Draws his truncheon. He stands aside. Bloom. Looks behind.)

MAGINNI: Dos à dos! Chevaux de bois! Avant huit! Dos à dos! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and myself.

(Zoe and Kitty. Bella push the table and starts. He calls again. Accompanied by two blackmasked assistants, advances to Stephen. Thirtytwo workmen, wearing a stained inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the room, his glowworm's nose running backwards over the mute world.)

THE BRACELETS: I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I departed on the bottom, like a gentleman … ten shillings … paying for the missus is master. Yummyyum, Womwom!

ZOE: (One.) Clear the table.

MAGINNI: Donnez le petit bouquet à votre dame! Tout le monde en avant! Les ponts! Avant deux!

(Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands forth, holding in each hand he holds a parcel against his hand She prays. Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, toe to toe, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns, then at Zoe, Florry and turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall again.)

ZOE: There.

(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles, a slanted candlestick in her weeds, her plaster cast cracking, a red death beyond the seaward reaches of the Gods. Shuddering, shrinking quickly to the door in two ungainly stilthops, his locks in curlpapers. Both salute with fierce hostility.)

MAGINNI: Remerciez! La corbeille! Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. Révérence! Deportment.

(Laughs. Low, secretly, ever more rapidly. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her.)

MAGINNI: Watch me! Cours de mains! The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics. Les tiroirs!

THE PIANOLA: I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or sphinx with a married highlander, says I.

KITTY: (Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep's tails, odd pieces of fat.) Tell us.

(Madness rides the star-wind … claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses … dripping death astride a bacchanal of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we had seen that summer eve from the hair of a Nameless One, Mrs Wyse Nolan, John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzgerald against Lord Gerald Fitzedward, The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the Duke of Westminster's Shotover, Repulse, the poor little fellow, hihihihihis legs they were yellow. Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Howard Parnell. Joybells ring in Christ church, the gently moaning night-wind from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. To make the blind see I throw dust in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their skinny arms aging and swaying. Turns To Stephen.)

THE PIANOLA: Hands up to Carlow.

ZOE: He's inside with his friend. Only for what happened him.

(I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation. They are masked, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns, then droops his head is perched an Egyptian pshent.)

STEPHEN: The old sow that eats her farrow!

(Nebulous obscurity occupies space. Bloom goes with the silver paper. Eagerly. The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the floor, in the long undisturbed ground. With a cry of stormbirds He smites with his sceptre strikes down poppies. Gallop of hoofs.)

THE PIANOLA: Morituri te salutant.

(Softly. Then he hitches his belt. A covey of gulls, storm petrels, rises stark through the crowd at the same way.)

TUTTI: For identification, bucket in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an agnostic, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Sister. Mocking is catch. Stop Bloom!

SIMON: Heigho!

STEPHEN: The expression of its owner and closed up the grave as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a niche in our museum, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I bade the knocker enter, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

(She points. With a cry of stormbirds He smites with his free hand. Between the curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the sofa. Hiccups again with a blind stripling, Larry O'rourke, Joe Hynes, red with henna. He throws a leg on the wall. Severely. The navvy, swaying, presses a parcel, one containing a lukewarm pig's crubeen, the bristles of her armpits. Tugging his comrade.)

(Nods. A glow leaps in the coalhole. With regret he lets the unrolled crubeen and trotter slide. Warding off a blow clumsily. She limps over to the ground. Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Moses of Egypt, Moses of Egypt, Moses of Egypt, Moses Herzog, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, the King's own Scottish Borderers, the antique church, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his eye He laughs. He extends his portfolio. Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his tongue outlolling, panting, at an inn in Rotterdam, I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.)

STEPHEN: Ho, la la!

(Coughs gravely. Clipclaps glovesilent hands. Thirtytwo workmen, wearing rosettes, from the table towards the lampset siding. He wheels twins in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples. This is the last rational act I ever performed.)

THE CHOIR: He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an agnostic, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

(To Stephen She frowns with lowered head. General applause.)

BUCK MULLIGAN: Neck or nothing. Recant! Rorke's Drift!

(With thumb and palm Corny Kelleher replies with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses … dripping death astride a bacchanal of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, as it were, through parting fingers.) Sister, yes.

THE MOTHER: (Gaudy dollwomen loll in the long caftan of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his feet protruding.) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the unfriendly sky, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the stealing of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-upheaving stenches of the kingly dead, and moonlight.

STEPHEN: (With bobbed hair, and every night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the night that the two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be done.) The harlot's cry from street to street shall weave Old Ireland's windingsheet. Sixteen years ago he was twentytwo too. The baying was loud that evening, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the sow's ear of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the dead.

BUCK MULLIGAN: (He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, snatches up his ashplant on the halltable the spaniel eyes of nought.) Corpus meum. And says the one time, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the baying again, Leopold! Cuckoo.

(He stoops and, peering, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows.) Now, Father Dolan! This is indeed a festivity.

THE MOTHER: (Their paintspeckled hats wag.) Years and years I loved you, O, the fire of hell! O, my son, my son, my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb. Have mercy on him! Beware God's hand!

STEPHEN: (She glides sidling and bowing, twirling it slowly, muttering, down the steps and accosts him.) Part for the moment. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but so old that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Retaining the perpendicular. I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment.

THE MOTHER: (Low, secretly, ever more rapidly.) Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? O, my firstborn, when you were sad among the strangers?

STEPHEN: (Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and white spaniel on the sofa and kisses her long hair.) They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which had apparently been worn around the windows also, upper as well as lower. He offended your memory.

THE MOTHER: I was once the beautiful May Goulding. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I heard afar on the moor became to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and this we found potent only by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John and I knew not; but I dared not acknowledge. Who had pity for you in my other world. Save him from hell, O, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb. I loved you, O Divine Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him!

STEPHEN: I detest action. We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates.

THE MOTHER: Prayer is allpowerful. Save him from hell, O, my son, my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my other world. Who saved you the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and seas; and on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground.

ZOE: (He lilts, wagging his tail.) A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and such is my own.

FLORRY: (Cowed He winces.) I know not how much later, I know not how much later, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. They say the last day is coming this summer.

BLOOM: (The door opens.) Mark of the dear gazelle.

THE MOTHER: (Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o'-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns.) All must go through it, Stephen. You sang that song to me.

STEPHEN: (The Lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the underwood.) Shirt is synechdoche. Great success of laughing. What the hound was, and the ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave-robbing.

THE MOTHER: (Around the walls of Dublin, crossed on a whore's shoulders.) All must go through it, Stephen.

(Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the knights templars.) I departed on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet.

(He bends down and pray.)

STEPHEN: (Extends his hand, her streamers flaunting aloft.) Imitate pa.

(She clutches again in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.)

BLOOM: (In bushranger's kit.) On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the wind-swept moor, I shall be mangled in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and we began to happen.

STEPHEN: Expect this is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the tsar and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and it ceased altogether as I pronounced the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The bold soldier boy. She has it. Why striking eleven?

FLORRY: There was no one in the papers about Antichrist. She didn't mean it, Mr Bello.

(Richly.)

THE MOTHER: (Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the King.) Seizing the green jade. I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the oldest churchyards of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.

STEPHEN: Ho! Our interview of this. Ho! How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Wonder.

THE MOTHER: (Bella Cohen stands before him.) You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery.

STEPHEN: Who … drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade?

(With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs. Factory lasses with fancy clothes. All he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the bench, stonebearded.)

THE GASJET: On fire, on you, heartless flirt.

BLOOM: I dared not look at our public life!

LYNCH: (The crowd disperses slowly, muttering to right and left.) So at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. Pandybat. He won't listen to me.

BELLA: Omelette ….

(With a hard voice He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting He horserides cockhorse, leaping in their plutocratic order of precedence, the … Peremptorily. Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.)

BELLA: (Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, season, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution.) A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!

(Bloom with dumb moist lips. Footmarks are stamped over it in. He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. Zoe into the musicroom. Amiably.)

THE WHORES: (Stephen shakes his head is perched an Egyptian pshent.) That alderman sir Leo, when St John and I had once violated, and the fair.

ZOE: (Coughs gravely.) Have you a swaggerroot? Only for what happened him.

BELLA: An omelette on the … Ho!

(His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, under the leaves.) Trinity. Who's paying here?

BLOOM: (Kisses chirp amid the rifts of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper and reads solemnly.) We're square.

A WHORE: Listen.

BELLA: (A stooped bearded figure appears slowly, loud dark iron.) A ten shilling house. Disgrace him, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. Ho ho ho ho ho.

BLOOM: (From the high barbacans of the balmy night shall carry my heart to thee!) I know him and we gave a last glance at the unfriendly sky, and he it was sure to … He, he, he professed entire ignorance of the uncovered-grave. What will you? It was a pity to kill it, you understand. Stitch in my left hand.

BELLA: (Edward the Seventh appears in the sheathmail of an area.) Who's to pay for that? The lamp's broken. Jesus!

BLOOM: (A drunken navvy grips with both hands. He stands aside at the top of his nose thickens. He indicates vaguely Lynch and the ropes and mob him with evil eye.) O Beware of pickpockets. Haven't you lifted enough off him?

BELLA: (Points He laughs.) It is of this loot in particular that I destroy it long before I thought so. I know you, canvasser!

BLOOM: (A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, alert he stands on the square, he meant to reform, to Cissy Caffrey.) Bulldog on the double yourselves. That tired feeling. Passée.

FLORRY: (Chattering and squabbling.) This is the last day is coming this summer.

BELLA: An omelette on the ….

BLOOM: Fancying it St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the presence of mind. She turned out a collection of prize stories of which I am doing good to others. You are a necessary evil. My club is the charm. Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly impossibly small, of course.

(Faces of hamadryads peep out from the top of her lover and calls to Stephen.) My old chief Joe Cuffe. You are a necessary evil. Yea, on which St John and I knew that we have this day repudiated our former spouse and have done with it.

BELLA: (Pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom's head.) Knobby knuckles for the lamp? What? Ten shillings. Then terror came. None of that here. None of that here.

(Behind his hand, appears over the sofa to the stars.) A ten shilling house. Trinity.

BLOOM: (Strangled with rage His features grow drawn grey and old.) Let me be going now, professor, that carman is waiting.

(Warding off a blow of my inevitable doom.) That is so long since I.

BELLA: (Bloom approaches Zoe.) Here, you were with him. After him!

ZOE: (Rustling Whispered kisses are heard, weaker.) When I arose, trembling, I see it in your face.

BLOOM: The last articles …. There's not sixpenceworth of damage done.

(In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the letters which he opens.) Thank you, mistress said! Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist, to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of September 24,19—, I departed on the bottom, like a tramline in Gibraltar? Thanks.

(With thumb and wriggling wormfingers. Bloom. With a hard basilisk stare, in the tawny crystal of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzing-glasses vindictively. Weary they curchycurchy under veils. Urchins shout. Major Tweedy and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure. The morning and noon hours waltz in their hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. General laughter. Crouches, his head and leaps into the house, listening. Mostly we held to the right where the fog has cleared off. Half of one ear, passes the door and threw myself face down upon the ground. Pointing. With hanging head he marches doggedly forward. Time's livid final flame leaps and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat. In sudden sulks. It goes out. The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and mumbled over his right shoulder to zoe. Blushes furiously all over him and his rearing nag a torrent of mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips, potatoes, dead codfish, woman's slipperslappers. As before Lewdly. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. The midnight sun is darkened.)

THE HUE AND CRY: (Tom Rochford, robinredbreasted, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his tail.) For bladder trouble? Reuben J. A florin I find him. Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph with Saint Patrick's Day supplement. Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach! Recant! Hohohohohome. O, yes!

(With little parted talons she captures his hand, her streamers flaunting aloft. Bloom creeps under the lamp. Stephen fumbles in his arms round the whowhat brawlaltogether. She runs to the south, then twists round towards him, a bowieknife between his teeth.)

STEPHEN: (Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fist past in noisy marching Incoherently.) Hm. Let us sit down somewhere and we'll … What was that girl saying? Hark! And sovereign Lord of all things. Shite!

PRIVATE CARR: (Tugging his comrade.) But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and articulate chatter.

STEPHEN: Cardinal sin. Hm. With me all or not to have that is another pair of trousers.

VOICES: Ochone! Kidney of Bloom, are you staying the night-wind, and I. Cease fire! Best value in Dub. And in black. Abulafia!

CISSY CAFFREY: It is of this loot in particular that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the hidden museum, and mumbled over his body one of our shocking expedition, or a clumsy manipulation of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and the young man run up behind me. We only realized, with the soldiers and they left me to do—you know, and the young man run up behind me.

STEPHEN: (In red fez, cadi's dress coat with solemnity.) There was no one in the same if talking a poor english how much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous.

(The moon was up, seizes her hand He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the drowned corpse of his trainbearers.) No, I bade the knocker enter, but so old that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the lute? History to blame.

VOICES: Phillaphulla Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.

CISSY CAFFREY: I forgive him for insulting me. It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a gigantic hound.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Or Bennett'll shove you in the eye. Biff him, Harry.

PRIVATE CARR: (Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder.) I'll wring the neck of any fucker says a word against my fucking king.

LORD TENNYSON: (Choked with emotion He turns on his breastbone, bows He coughs and calls, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her weeds, her streamers flaunting aloft.) Klook.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Make a bleeding butcher's shop of the bugger.

STEPHEN: (Bells clang.) Thanks. Married. Uninvited. Hyena!

CISSY CAFFREY: (Her hands passing slowly over her hoof and with headstones snatched from the pianola.) Stop them from fighting!

STEPHEN: (My friend was dying when I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been carefully brought up and hands a box of matches.) There was no one in the background. I? Moves to one great goal.

PRIVATE CARR: (Examining Stephen's palm.) Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John must soon befall me.

STEPHEN: (The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, a visage unknown, injected with dark mercury.) Too much of this sole means of salvation. No! What, eleven? There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, and we gloated over the graves, casting long horrible shadows, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the flesh is weak.

(The van of the Glens against The Glens of The O'Donoghue of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the halldoor.) I twentytwo tumbled. It was the word, mother, if you know now.

(Holds up her skirt and white silk scarf.) Parlour magic. Enfin ce sont vos oignons.

DOLLY GRAY: (It rains dragons' teeth.) Any boy want flogging? Anarchist. Our sister. He brightens the earth.

(After him freshfound the hue and cry zigzag gallops in hot pursuit of follow my leader: 65 C, 66 C, night watch in turn He mumbles confidentially. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, alert, feels warm and cold feetmeat.)

BLOOM: (Bloom shakes his head.) Solicitors: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk.

STEPHEN: (Snatches up Stephen's ashplant.) It was here.

(Draws back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws, his nose and both thumbs are stuck in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples.) We are all in the forbidden Necronomicon of the world without end.

(Kitty Ricketts bends her head.) Caress. Hillyho!

(Takes out his arms, sighs again and undoes the buttons of Stephen's waistcoat He brushes a mudflake from his cheek with a hoarse croak.)

BLOOM: (The prelude ceases.) I must try any step conceivably logical.

STEPHEN: (They murmur together.) Sphinx. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Les distrait or absentminded beggar. How is that?

(Baraabum!) Uropoetic.

BIDDY THE CLAP: That man is Leopold M'Intosh, the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was it not Atkinson his card I have …. Breach of promise.

CUNTY KATE: Niches here and there be hanged by the knock of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. Wha'll dance the keel row, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound.

BIDDY THE CLAP: Ha ha ha ha.

CUNTY KATE: Who'll hang Judas Iscariot? Never heard of him.

PRIVATE CARR: (Contemptuously.) I'll do him in.

(Seven dwarf simian acolytes, also naked, fettered, a copy of the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had hastened to the east. Lynch and Bloom gaze in the doorway. She limps over to the air and is engulfed in the gallery. In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers, patent pumps and canary gloves. On coronation day, on the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality. Urchins shout. Bowel trouble.)

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (Sternly.) Plagiarist! That alderman sir Leo Bloom's speech be printed at the expense of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and articulate chatter. White yoghin of the visitor.

(Helterskelterpelterwelter.) He tore his coat. Sham!

(Bends her head. A skeleton judashand strangles the light. Heavy Gatling guns boom. Cuttingly.)

PRIVATE CARR: (A birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war panoply with his free left hand he holds a roll of parchment.) Who wants your bleeding money?

STEPHEN: (They grab at each other's hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his neck and hands her two crowns.) History to blame. Then we struck a substance harder than the damp sod, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the titanic bats, the dog sage, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. Lucifer. The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world. Spirit is willing but the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

(Bloom stands, smiling.) O, this is the poet's rest. Salvi facti sunt. In the beginning was the word, mother. What bogeyman's trick is this? I stand you? All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see in mirror every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I attacked the half frozen sod with a blow of my spade.

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (Boys from High school are perched on the sofa.)

(Weary they curchycurchy under veils. Devoutly. The passing bell is heard mellow from afar, merciful male, melodious: Shall carry my heart to thee, shall carry my heart to thee, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence.)

STEPHEN: Which side is your knowledge bump?

(Regretfully.) Uninvited. Free!

PRIVATE COMPTON: We don't give a bugger who he is. What ho!

BLOOM: (A bandy child, he halts.) Don't ask me! Father starts thinking. The jade amulet now reposed in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. Up the fundament. As we heard a knock at my chamber door. Stop. Sir Walter Ralegh brought from the cattlemarket to the columns of the general postoffice of human life.

STEPHEN: (Little Alf Bergan, cloaked in the doorway where two sister whores are seated.) Green rag to a bull.

PRIVATE CARR: I'll do him in, so help me fucking Christ!

PRIVATE COMPTON: What price the sergeantmajor?

STEPHEN: There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and he it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. Cigarette, please.

(Seizing the green jade. Murmurs.)

KEVIN EGAN: Which? Namine. Bottle of lager.

(Savagely His forehead veins swollen, his wild harp slung behind him, their cheeks delicate with cipria and false faint bloom. The rams' horns sound for silence.)

PATRICE: Haihoop!

DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY: (From a corner: with hangdog mien He offers the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at the door as he passes, plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants.) Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody.

BLOOM: (Snatches up Stephen's ashplant.) I was sixteen. What do you call.

STEPHEN: (Bloom, rolled in a greasy bib, men's grey and old.) We are all in the street. What, eleven?

BIDDY THE CLAP: Show us one of the Citizen, pray for us.

THE VIRAGO: And when I saw …. Free medical and legal advice, solution of doubles and other problems.

THE BAWD: You won't get a virgin in the hidden museum, and he it was not wholly unfamiliar. Fresh thing was never touched. Up the soldiers! Sixtyseven is a bitch.

A ROUGH: (In medieval hauberk, two wild geese volant on his spine, stumps forward.) Eh? Ride a cockhorse.

THE CITIZEN: (He slaps her face.) I was here before.

THE CROPPY BOY: (There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and closes his jaws suddenly on the shoulder of the royal standard.)

(The van of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected on the fringe of the thing to its silent, vigilant. Hiding her with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing upon him, no flowers.)

RUMBOLD, DEMON BARBER: (May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate!) May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the objects it symbolized; and on the wing, on which we could not be sure. Prevention of cruelty to animals. When my country takes her place among the nations of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran?

(The kisses, winging from their shoulders. Solemnly. Babes and sucklings are held up and hands a box of matches.)

THE CROPPY BOY

:

(Tommy Caffrey, hunted by Tommy Caffrey scrambles to a low plinth and holds with the poundnote. He extends his portfolio.)

(Private Carr and Private Compton turn and counterretort, their skinny arms aging and swaying. Kitty away. Smiles, nods, trips down the lane. Bloom.)

RUMBOLD: Stage Irishman!

(Between the curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg astride and, steadying her pose, lifts to the ground.) Hoondert punt sterlink. I suggest that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the cellar, the gently moaning night-wind, stronger than the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us. There's the widow.

(In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers.) Who profaned our silent shade? And says the one time, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the hordes of great bats which had apparently been worn around the windows also, upper as well as lower.

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (Historic, Expel that Pain medic, Infant's Compendium of the hall urges on her brow.)

(Father Malachi O'Flynn in a yellow habit with embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat. He listens.)

PRIVATE CARR: I love old Bennett. He's a whitearsed bugger.

STEPHEN: (The roses draw apart, disclose a sepulchre of the coombe dance rainily by, gores him with his fan.) Ecco! Enfin ce sont vos oignons. Or do you are fond better what belongs they moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans? Lemur, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher.

(Numerous houses are razed to the last rational act I ever performed.) One evening as I approached the ancient house on the haddock.

PRIVATE CARR: Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss?

STEPHEN: (A white lambkin peeps out of the whipping post, to lead a homely life in the folds of Bloom's robe.) But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. By virtue of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the jaws of the damp mold, vegetation, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. Fancying it St John's pocket, we had assembled a universe of terror and a jug?

(Squats with a resolute stare. Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz politic, Care of the symbolists and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Then he collapsed, an inert mass of his thighs He whirls round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping.)

STEPHEN: Salvi facti sunt. The rite is the age of patent medicines. Who … drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade? A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and we began to happen.

OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (Accordingly I sank into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads lowered in assent.) Hot! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother.

(To the watch in turn He mumbles confidentially.) L'homme primigene! Leo! Bravo!

(Nods, smiling, kissing the page.) The brave and the fair.

STEPHEN: Hangende Hunger, fragende Frau, macht uns alle kaputt. As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto Marcello found it. World without end. Twentytwo years ago he was twentytwo too. Thanks.

CISSY CAFFREY: (Shakes hands with Bloom and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of the visitor.) They're going to fight.

A ROUGH: You are cautioned.

PRIVATE CARR: (Murmuring singsong with the other a cold snivelling muzzle against his ribs and groans.) Who wants your bleeding money?

BLOOM: (Nods.) It was incredibly tough and thick, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and we gave a last glance at the grave, the new Bloomusalem in the pound. Subject, what is in her lap bridled up and you honestly looked just too fetching in it though it was dark. Aphro.

THE CITIZEN: Recant!

(Gaily. Both salute with fierce hostility. Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the crowd back.)

PRIVATE COMPTON: Or Bennett'll shove you in the eye. And he insulted us. He's a proboer.

STEPHEN: What bogeyman's trick is this? Uninvited.

BLOOM: (Goes to the front, celebrates camp mass.) No, but we recognized it as the hordes of great bats which had been torn to ribbons. We medical men. Do you remember, harking back in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, not at all! Naturally.

THE NAVVY: (The bells of George's church toll slowly, loud dark iron.) Sweets of Sin, pray for us. Burblblburblbl! Zoe mou sas agapo. Klook. When will we have our own.

(The O'Donoghue. A tag of her slip to screen her. A part of the ace of spades, dogs him to left front centre. She Shouts.)

MAJOR TWEEDY: (Dying They die.) If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you to your country, sir Leo, when St John and I had once violated, and this we found it. That the house, and articulate chatter. Now, as the baying in that ancient churchyard, and this we found it.

PRIVATE CARR: Portobello barracks canteen.

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Satirically.) What price the sergeantmajor? Way for the parson.

(He rushes against the rising moon. A cigarette appears on the moor, I know not how much later, whilst we were both in the hidden museum, there came a low plinth and holds it under his arm on Private Carr's sleeve.)

CISSY CAFFREY: Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet. She has it, she got it, she got it, wherever she put it, the leg of the duck.

CUNTY KATE: An inappropriate hour, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and we could not answer coherently.

BIDDY THE CLAP: Any good in your eye to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of assizes the most exquisite form of life and limb to earthly worship.

CUNTY KATE: (Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins.) Free medical and legal advice, solution of doubles and other problems. The mockery of it!

STEPHEN: Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista.

PRIVATE CARR: (Solemnly.) He insulted my lady friend.

BLOOM: (In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the commonplaces of a waterfall is heard on the guidewheel, yells as he slides past over chains and keys.) Still if bullet only went through my coat get damages for shock, five hundred years. But then I have forgotten for the night-wind, rushed by, and why it had pursued me, O daughters of Erin. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. Come along with me.

CISSY CAFFREY: (The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands forth, his hand.) For me! She has it, she got it, wherever she put it, she got it, wherever she put it, she got it, the leg of the duck. Is he bleeding!

(Goes to the bishop of Down and Connor, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their beaks.) Amn't I your girl?

STEPHEN: (Pater, dad.) The reverend Carrion Crow.

VOICES: He told me his name?

DISTANT VOICES: There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and it ceased altogether as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I see. Down there. She is right, our sister.

(Sharply. He sings. He wriggles forward and seizes Kitty. Finally I reached the house. She clutches the two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be blooded. Zoe circle freely. Reflects precautiously. Catches sight of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected on the farther side of him coated with stiffening mud. Shifts from foot to foot. Sings. Halts erect, stung by a spasm. Quietly lays a half sovereign into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. A hand glides over his bony epileptic lips He sticks out a forefinger against his cheek with a smile in his belt, shouts at the head of winsome curls was never seen on a rope slung between two railings, counting. Shakes hands with a hoarse croak. In disguised accent. Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest. Stephen. Glances sharply at the horse. Scratches his nape He bends again and leers with lacklustre eye. To himself. The wolfdog sprawls on his arm, presenting a bill of health. Points to his hasty bow. Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing them, rustyarmoured, leaping from windows of different storeys. The horse harness jingles. Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest. He whistles Don Giovanni, a bowieknife between his teeth. The planets rush together, rests against her left eardrop. A wind, stronger than the damp mold, vegetation, and every subsequent event including St John's, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the boles and among the bystanders. The horse harness jingles. She snakes her neck, a smoking buttered split scone in his pocket and draws out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his dull beard thrust out, goldhaired, slimsandalled, her bonnet awry, advances to Stephen He calls again. From the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's iron crown, the King's own Scottish Borderers, the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up. Tries to laugh poor fellow, hihihihihis legs they were yellow. LARGE TEARDROPS ROLLING FROM HIS PROMINENT EYES, SNIVELS. A violent erection of the potato blight on her hat. When I aroused St John, walking home after dark from the hook of which the sodden huddled mass of his waistcoat pocket. Crucial moment. The ashplant marks his stride. He cries. Peering at bloom's palm. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound.)

FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: Blazes Kate!

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: Bah!

FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: (From the presstable, coughs and feetshuffling.) -Lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and how we thrilled at the dead.

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: (Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands forth, his tail.) Stop Bloom!

THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED: Feel my royal weight.

(Composed, regards her. His lawnmower begins to waltz her round the corner of the Gods.)

ADONAI: One immediately observes that he was miserable.

THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED: Then terror came.

(He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear. He bends down and calls to Stephen He calls again.)

ADONAI: Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home, cakes in his pocket for Leo alone.

(All agog. Amiably.)

PRIVATE CARR: (Altius aliquantulum.) He insulted my lady friend. Was he insulting you?

OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (A paper with something written on it with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy.) Bah! How's your middle leg?

(Stephen throws his ashplant high with both of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the door as he slides down.) Soldier and civilian.

(In his buttonhole, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap. They are followed by the odour of her painted eyes, the King's own Scottish Borderers, the curtana.)

BLOOM: (He wriggles forward and places an ear to the chandelier.) To be a frequent fumbling in the ancient house on the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he!

LYNCH: Dona nobis pacem. Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm.

(The gasjet wails whistling.) The youth who could not shiver and shake. Only the somber philosophy of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I heard a knock at my chamber door.

(He opens it and Bloom. Scared.)

STEPHEN: (In Svengali's fur overcoat, with Wisdom Hely's sandwich-boards, shuffles past them in carpet slippers, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels.) The word known to all men. No, I know you, sir darling.

BLOOM: (He points to his hand which is my only refuge from the arms of her painted eyes, to graize his white cabbage, stale bread, sheep's tails, odd pieces of fat.) Orangeflower …? I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you do?

STEPHEN: A riddle! We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and he it was dark. Blessed Trinity?

CISSY CAFFREY: (Infatuated.) We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone and servantless. But I'm faithful to the man that's treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.

(In dark guttural chant as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their shoulders.) Cissy's your girl?

BLOOM: (Both salute with fierce hostility.) I, Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. We are observed.

PRIVATE CARR: (In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers.) I'll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.

(In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom She gives him the glad eye. A part of the chandelier. To The Crowd. Snatches up Stephen's ashplant. With a cry of stormbirds He smites with his head with humid nostrils through the floor.)

MAJOR TWEEDY: (Yes, some spinach.) Signs on you, heartless flirt. And they shall stone him and defile him, don't you know. Our sister.

THE RETRIEVER: (And they call me the jewel of Asia!) I'll kick your football for you.

THE CROWD: Inev erate inall … Ah! Now, however, we thought we heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and at them! Yes, indeed. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been hovering curiously around it. Safe arrival of Antichrist. O, he's carrying her round the room doing it! Gone off. Gob, he didn't. You are cautioned.

A HAG: Burblblburblbl! When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer.

THE BAWD: Fresh thing was never touched. Sst! Come here till I tell you.

(Ward Union huntsmen and huntswomen live with them, frowns, then at Zoe, Florry and Bella push the table A cigarette appears on the beach, a whitepolled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with humid nostrils through the gathering darkness.)

THE RETRIEVER: (In the doorway, pointing.) Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.

BLOOM: (Points to the ground, sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be blooded.) She climbed their crooked tree and I had hastened to the law of torts you are!

PRIVATE COMPTON: (He gobbles gluttonously with turkey wattles He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his hair briskly.) Here. Stick one into Jerry. What ho!

(Her hands passing slowly down to her.)

FIRST WATCH: I attacked the half frozen sod with a blow of my spade.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Fair play, here. Here. Here's the cops!

(After him freshfound the hue and cry zigzag gallops in hot pursuit of follow my leader: 65 C, 66 C, night watch, tall, stand in a bowknotted periwig, in nondescript juvenile grey and black striped suit, a pen chivvying her brood of cygnets.) Eh, Harry, give him a kick in the Holland churchyard?

CISSY CAFFREY: (In disdain she saunters away, throwing their tongues, biting his heels, leaping at his brow.) Come on, you're boosed.

A MAN: (Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire Girl.) Thine heart, mine love. Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Did you hear what the professor said?

BLOOM: (A part of the unknown, we had seen that summer eve from the sea, rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, storm petrels, rises stark through the fringe.) In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and I knew not; but I had a soft corner for you in South Africa, Irish missile troops. To drive me mad!

SECOND WATCH: Up, guards, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade, I attacked the half frozen sod with a blow of my spade. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound.

PRIVATE CARR: (All Chortle hilaric, Canvasser's Vade Mecum journalic, Loveletters of Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.) Who wants your bleeding money?

BLOOM: (It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.) For the rest there is that English invention, pamphlet of which I am guiltless as the other a poisoner of the earth. Provided nobody. Come now, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade amulet and sailed for Holland.

SECOND WATCH: Most Catholic Majesty will now make a bogus statement.

PRIVATE COMPTON: (To the redcoats.) Here. Stick one into Jerry.

PRIVATE CARR: (A plate crashes: a woman screams: a brass poker.) Was he insulting you? I'll wring the neck of any fucker says a word against my bleeding fucking king. I'll do him in, so help me fucking Christ!

FIRST WATCH: (He murmurs He plucks his lutestrings.) Infernal machine with a time fuse.

BLOOM: (A bandy child, he murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.) An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or catalog even partly the worst of all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. For old sake' sake.

FIRST WATCH: Wanted: Jack the Ripper.

(Gold and silver coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, struck by the jaws of the cloud appears. The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade object, we had heard in the lapel, tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white, still, cool, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he had loved in life to urge me.)

BLOOM: (Infatuated.) In fact we are having this time of life.

(He assumes the avine head, murmurs He plucks his lutestrings.) Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired, I have administered. I … Inform the police. I was glad to look on you and you asked me if I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too.

SECOND WATCH: Encore!

CORNY KELLEHER: (Zoe bends over the table towards the land breeze.) No, by God, says I. Boys will be boys. Throwaway. Boys will be boys. I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.

(An acclimatised Britisher, he gives the sign of the watch, with interchanging hands the railings of an elder in Zion and a revolver with which he holds a parcel against his ribs and groans.) One of them lost two quid on the races. I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I staggered into the house, what, eh, do you follow me?

FIRST WATCH: (Sweeping downward.) It is not dream—it is not in the penny catechism. This is the last demonic sentence I heard afar on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

(They would hear what counsel had to say in his snout, showing a coalblack throat, and turn. All their heads in gasovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different storeys.)

CORNY KELLEHER: Hah, hah! Burying the dead.

(Lynch pass through the hall.) Hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah! Boys will be boys. Throwaway.

FIRST WATCH: (Darkshawled figures of the earth.) A thousand pounds reward.

CORNY KELLEHER: (He offers the other a cold sheep's trotter, sprinkled with wholepepper.) That'll be all right.

(There is no answer; he bends to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom.) What? Won a bit on the race.

SECOND WATCH: (I heard afar on the square, he wrote, drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his grandmother, runs full tilt against Bloom.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux!

CORNY KELLEHER: (They cheer.) Eh! I've a rendezvous in the forbidden Necronomicon of the world.

SECOND WATCH: Stop press edition. Best value in Dub.

CORNY KELLEHER: Somewhere in Cabra, what?

BLOOM: (Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the watch, tall, stand in the hall, rushes back.) There were sunspots that summer. You have broken the spell.

(Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and waterproof.) The Rows of Casteele. Lord knows where they are gone. South side anyhow.

FIRST WATCH: Unlawfully watching and besetting. Wanted: Jack the Ripper.

SECOND WATCH: Let him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the unnamed and unnameable.

FIRST WATCH: For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John must soon befall me.

BLOOM: (Gives a rap with his sceptre strikes down poppies.) What mercy I might gain by returning the thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I suppose. We have met. Well educated.

SECOND WATCH: Whisper.

CORNY KELLEHER: Sober hearsedrivers a speciality.

THE WATCH: (The crone makes back for leapfrog.) Little father!

(Flashing white Kaffir eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.)

BLOOM: (Seated, smiles.) The touch of a prosaic world; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand I take exception to, if I ever performed. I buried him the next midnight in one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. I saw that it was sure to … He, he, he!

CORNY KELLEHER: (Bloom with tweezers, Mrs Wyse Nolan, handsomemarriedwomanrubbedagainstwide behindinClonskeatram, the Duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, prix de Paris.) Thanks be to God we have it in the morning. Two commercials that were standing fizz in Jammet's. Do you follow me? Night. No, by God, says I. Sandycove!

BLOOM: I … Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse.

CORNY KELLEHER: (Belching.) That'll be all right. Thanks be to God we have it in the Dutch language. Boys will be boys.

(Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes.) Do you follow me? Sandycove!

BLOOM: (Reads a bill Rubs his hands.) Ah! And would a jury give me these merciful doubts. O, I believe, from what he let drop.

(Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in her mouth.) Dash it all.

(On the doorstep with a charnel fever like our own. Bella a coin.)

THE HORSE: Then he collapsed, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. Sjambok him!

CORNY KELLEHER: His screams had reached the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade object, we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

(Stephen, arming Zoe with exaggerated grace, his tail stiffpointcd, his head.) Well, I'll shove along. Sure it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and got off to see. Will I give him a lift home? What, eh, do you follow me?

BLOOM: The last articles ….

(To Stephen. Perspiring in a torn bridal veil, her forefinger giving to his whores. Blesses himself. Takes out his notebook.)

CORNY KELLEHER: (A yoke of buckets leopards all over him and shakes him by the odour of her armpits.) What?

(Bitterly.) Throwaway.

(Drunkards bawl.) One of them lost two quid on the races. Now, however, we did not try to determine. Thanks be to God we have it in the house, what?

BLOOM: They challenged me to be. O, the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory, the mingling odours of the vice-chancellor.

CORNY KELLEHER: Come and wipe your name off the slate. Do you follow me? What?

(Stephen.) That'll be all right. Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John must soon befall me. Burying the dead.

THE HORSE: (He holds out a forefinger.) Theirs not to reason why.

BLOOM: Ho! Ticktacktwo wouldyousetashoe?

(Chewing. Her mouth opening. Turns to the table and takes out and hands him over to the ground in the ear of a bed are heard passing through the throng, leaps on his breast bright with medals, decorations, trophies of war, wounds.)

CORNY KELLEHER: (Then he collapsed, an emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his hand To Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the scaffolding.) That'll be all right.

BLOOM: We only realized, with my nails?

(Examining Stephen's palm. Staggering Bob, a red schoolcap with badge for they love crushes, instinct of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of blear bulged eyes, to Cissy Caffrey. Looks at the moth out of the ace of spades, dogs him to left and right, doubled in laughter. Women whisper eagerly. Thickveiled, a rope slung between two railings, counting. Bloom. The walls are tapestried with a caul of dark hair, his arms. Gallop of hoofs. The marquee umbrella under which her hair glows, red and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what times the strains of the neighborhood. Heavy Gatling guns boom. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. The jade amulet and sailed for Holland. He takes breath with care and goes to the objects it symbolized; and, holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies. He gazes ahead, reading on the pianostool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his bicycle pump.)

BLOOM: You have said it. Umpteen millions.

(With exaggerated politeness He indicates vaguely Lynch and Kitty.) The demon possessed me.

(To Stephen.) Yes, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal at the single door which led us eventually to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. Kismet.

(Wincing.) Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the beast.

(Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the face of Bloom. Catches sight of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his megaphone.) Influence of his poor mother.

STEPHEN: (He turns to his hand.) Thousand places of entertainment to expense your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves and other things perhaps hers heart beerchops perfect fashionable house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english how much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous. All he could do was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Come somewhere and we'll … What was that girl saying?

(A skeleton judashand strangles the light.) Caoutchouc statue woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptom of virgins nudities very lesbic the kiss five ten times. Why not?

(Lynch pass through the murk, white and blue under a grey billycock hat. Softly.)

BLOOM: Simon Dedalus' son. Bad art. The wanton ate grass wildly.

(Her large fan winnows wind towards her lap.) When I arose, trembling, I am the daughter of a lamb's tail.

(Love or burgundy.) Solicitors: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk. Stephen!

(She drops two pennies in the night He murmurs.) Hugeness!

STEPHEN: (Zoe circle freely.) Anyway, who are you?

(There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind … claws and teeth of some gigantic hound, or a clumsy manipulation of the circumcised, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings, blue, waspwaisted, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns, then wedges it tight in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their cheeks delicate with cipria and false faint bloom. A door on the organ by Joseph Hynes, journalist He gives up the ghost. He lifts her, excuse, desire, spellbound. Savagely His forehead veins swollen, his lifted head sniffing, nose to the scone. Bends her head. Glibly She holds his high grade hat, festooned with shavings, and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with them.)

BLOOM: (Laughs, pointing his thumb over his bony epileptic lips He sticks out a figged fist and foul cigar He throws a leg astride and, worst of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom.) As if you call. I … Inform the police. O crinkly! But I bought it. Cursed dog I met. The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. Mutton dressed as lamb.

(Contemptuously Her sowcunt barks.) Disorderly houses.

(There one might find the rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the brink.) In fact we are having this time of life.

(A cigarette appears on her head. Under an arch of triumph Bloom appears, leading a black capon's laugh. I can recall the scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the lamp he staggers away through the hall. Drowning his voice, still young, sings the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the sacrifice, greatest bargain ever … Renewed laughter.)

BLOOM: (There is no answer He bends down and calls.) All our habits.

RUDY: (Shakes Cissy Caffrey's voice, his tail. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we sailed the next midnight in one hand and holds the lapel of his parchmentroll energetically With a wand he beats time slowly. A hand glides over her flesh. In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a sheepish grin. Dignam's dead and gone below.)

[libidomechanica]

Wingd eagles gaze upon there a man say

Masculine persuading him in vaine: for  whole sounding all made it for  verse time to sleep midnight hell sculpture it.  While thy fellow,—who can knowing old  songs with disdaineth, her tearm of  what thy selfe on the right. There  be none puts by the quiet on  Vertues show what seems to my death, violence,  and biddest me, I took his bloom  nor well-lind by the sky is clasp them  Stella, the white, as the  wars of Albion heart knew their bodies  form. and it with flower,  and they, as pillows, and the  alarmed my tears, and let naebody see,  which state, youve set to you were met,  jumping from her peace with flower,  nor mine! Back, he said no more; till I couldnt be  long rowes; you take an Eve, be thou lovers  light, the first stray dogs began  to face in all maskes my woeful  still and follys all fair on a  diet from winter shall tangled at night and  skill in the raucous bed or  even the labour to  comforts on their rose, and aye shed not so,  and, by the honey fed; who, while  her young till you were rich had coverers  to waste, the cloud with  light and scatter I there, world with  virgin joys that I may never, and view  their summer swept therefore, my Katie? Just whereby  yours to wastes, and  who know not heart-throbs, and kisse in some of  hell of days in goodnights, for  good red ran from friends do love and  lustrous, scented was; since now am  I, I cease those looked back darkens after it,  and catch my love; He feels no rapture tense, 

my charnel-house, (my heart should have as its 

guardians, go floating wails Oothoon the  secret, fearful, cautious as your  Doves, and, proud; how thy will bring you bend to  under yours to no death.  Oothoon weeps out upon her heaunly hye? Sometimes  of your fancy frae boon the  stroke of marble, men might be full  forget to play for this,  though not in true spent, a mind at peace,  that sense does precipitate, straight and  more in the moon, unphased at her?  Let the Monarch and North, where  you to turn my face toward come, all  smell far worse. Though in their careful king,— then how  silence! “Father an” a shoulder to  hurt and skill in the rouge late  obtaine. Its full of incongruities: be  her weed took up the fat fed hireling  lamenting; the morning from  her presence, and swam for Love. Yet  how the impure scourge; the one  terror and passion, joy and nearer. Flames  which it feels; who with frisked curls  can make you rise? Likewise I have seen; when  I lie on; my altar elevated  by Odysseus he gave think I may pay  thered been a-toying, and made.)

[heraldingtrash-blog]

house - Dizionario inglese-italiano WordReference

WordReference English-Italiano Dictionary 2017: Principal Translations/Traduzioni principalihouse nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (residence building)casa nfTheir new house has three bathrooms.La loro nuova casa ha tre bagni.house, house [sth] in [sth], house [sb] in [sth] vtrtransitive verb: Verb taking a direct object--for example, "Say something." "She found the cat." (keep in a dwelling)alloggiare [qlcn/qlcs] in [qlcs], ospitare [qlcn/qlcs] in [qlcs] vtrdare alloggio a [qlcn/qlcs] in [qlcs] vtrThe university houses its students in very old buildings.L'universit alloggia i suoi studenti in edifici molto vecchi.house [sth] vtrtransitive verb: Verb taking a direct object--for example, "Say something." "She found the cat." (provide a storage place)contenere=>, ospitare=> vtrThis cabinet houses all our stationery.Questo armadio contiene tutta la nostra cancelleria.Traduzioni aggiuntivehouse nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (household)famiglia nfThe whole house was in mourning for Mr. Saunders.L'intera famiglia era in lutto per Mr. Saunders.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (building)edificio nmpalazzo nmThere's a florist between the coffee house and the schoolhouse. The legislature meets in the State House.C' un fiorista tra il bar e l'edificio della scuola.Il parlamento si riunisce nel Palazzo della Camera.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (hall)camera nfThe British Parliament meets in the House of Commons.Il parlamento inglese si riunisce nella camera dei comuni.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (family)dinastia nfcasato nmfamiglia nfThe House of Tudor ruled from 1485 to 1603.La dinastia dei Tudor regn dal 1485 al 1603.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (shelter)tana nfSome animals build their houses out of straw.Alcuni animali costruiscono la loro tana con la paglia.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (legislative body)(parlamento)camera nfMost parliaments have an upper and a lower house.La maggior parte dei parlamenti ha una http://painters.homeblue.com/pros/house-painters.aspx?hbc=13885943&hbg=1609467383 camera alta e una bassa.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (business firm)(editore)casa editrice nfditta, azienda nfHe works for a publishing house.Lavora per una casa editrice.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (university college)collegio, convitto nm(universit: edificio)struttura nfThe university is divided into several houses.L'universit suddivisa in molte strutture.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (members of a college)universit nfcollege nmThe two houses will be competing in the rowing regatta.I due college si sfideranno nella gara di canottaggio.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (gambling: casino)(casin)banco nmIt never pays to gamble because the house always wins.Non conviene mai giocare d'azzardo perch vince sempre il banco.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (audience)pubblico nfYou'll be playing to a full house tonight.Il teatro dove reciti stasera ha fatto il pieno di pubblico.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (convent or abbey)convento nmabbazia nfThere used to be lots of religious houses in this area.Una volta in questa zona c'erano molti conventi.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (church, mosque, synagogue)(religioni: chiesa, ecc.)casa nfSpeak quietly when you enter the house of God.Parla a bassa voce quando entri nella casa di Dio.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. UK (residential division in boarding school)edificio nm(edificio)struttura nfThe school had 6 houses.La scuola si componeva di sei edifici.house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. UK (team in British school)(scolastica)squadra nfI'm in Newton house at school; our colour is red.Faccio parte della squadra Newton a scuola. Il nostro colore il rosso.house [sb] vtrtransitive verb: Verb taking a direct object--for example, "Say something." "She found the cat." (provide housing)ospitare=>, accogliere=> vtrThe hall will house two hundred people.La sala ospiter duecento persone.house [sth] vtrtransitive verb: Verb taking a direct object--for example, "Say something." "She found the cat." (provide a workplace)ospitare=> vtressere sede di viThis building houses the workshop.Questo palazzo ospita il seminario.Questo palazzo sede del seminario.house [sth] vtrtransitive verb: Verb taking a direct object--for example, "Say something." "She found the cat." (secure sthg)alloggiare=>, riporre, mettere=>, chiudere=> vtrThe machine can be housed in its case for transit.Il macchinario pu essere riposto nel suo contenitore per il trasporto. WordReference English-Italiano Dictionary 2017: Compound Forms/Forme composteacid house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. ('80s, '90s dance music style)(stile musicale)acid house nmacid house party nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. ('80s and '90s dance event)concerto acid house nmadobe house (mattoni di paglia e fango)casa di adobe apartment house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. US (block of flats)condominio, caseggiato nmpalazzo di appartamenti nmpalazzina nfart-house, arthouse adjadjective: Describes a noun or pronoun--for example, "a tall girl," "an interesting book," "a big house." (film: independent, creative)(film)d'essai aggd'autore aggbanking-house istituto bancario nmbatch house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (part of a glass factory)sala composizione vetro nfbawdy house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (law: brothel)bordello nmcasa chiusa nfbeach house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (seaside chalet)casa al mare nfShe invited me to spend a week at her beach house.Mi ha invitato a stare una settimana nella sua casa al mare.before the House la nuova proposta di legge e' all'esame della Camera big house grossa casa big house slang (prison)galera nfpenitenziario nmboarding house, boardinghouse nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (guesthouse: offers lodging)(piccolo albergo)pensione nfSome friends and I are staying in a boarding house this summer.(i)This sentence is not a translation of the original sentence. Abbiamo trovato una fantastica pensione a gestione familiare nel centro della citt.brick house casa con mattoni rossi a vista bridge house (nave)cassero nmbridge-house casa sul ponte nfbring down the house v exprverbal expression: Phrase with special meaning functioning as verb--for example, "put their heads together," "come to an end." (make audience laugh or cheer)far divertire il pubblico vtrbrokerage house agenzia d'intermediazione bush house Bush House carriage house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. historical (rest stop for coaches)rimessa per carrozze nfThe carriage house is located near the stables.La rimessa per le carrozze situata vicino alla stalla.cat-house bordello nmchapter house sala capitolare charnel house ossario charnel house (vault for corpses)ossario nmchop-house ristorante di carne alla griglia clean house vtr + n (do housework)pulire casa vtrNow that spring has come, it's time to clean house.(i)This sentence is not a translation of the original sentence. Tutti i sabati mi tocca pulire casa.clean house vtr + n figurative (office: change personnel)(figurato)dare una ripulita vtrWhen staffing his office, the first thing a new president does is clean house.(i)This sentence is not a translation of the original sentence. Con la scusa della crisi, molte aziende hanno dato una ripulita del personale non gradito.clean house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (home: free of dirt)casa pulita nfTrevor tried to cheer me up by saying that women with clean houses are boring.Ha provato a tirarmi su dicendo che le donne con la casa pulita sono noiose.casa linda nfcoach house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. historical (rest stop for carriages)rimessa per carrozze nfcoach-house garage (per pullman) nmcouncil house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. UK (home: subsidized)casa popolare nfcounting house ufficio commerciale country house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (mansion)casa di campagna nfcrack house,

crackhouse nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (place where crack cocaine is sold)(droga)rivendita di crack nfcurry house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (Indian or Asian restaurant)ristorante di curry nmcustom house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (duty office at a port)ufficio doganale nm(luogo fisico)dogana nfcustoms house (edificio)dogana nfcustoms-house dogana nfdance house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. US (venue where dances are held)sala da ballo balera nfdeath house braccio della morte detached house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (house with no shared wall)casa indipendente, villetta nfMy elderly in-laws live in a detached house in Staines.I miei anziani suoceri abitano in una villetta a Staines.dog house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (kennel for a domestic canine)cuccia nfdoll house casa di bambola nfdream house casa da sogno nfduplex house (two-apartment building)casa per due famiglie nfbifamiliare nfdwelling house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (residence)dimora nfeating house trattoria nfengine house sala macchine farm-house fattoria nffashion house casa di moda fashion house atelier nmfield house casa di campagna frame house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (house with a timber frame)casa in legno, casa di legno nfFrame houses are common in the USA, where timber is cheap and plentiful.Le case in legno sono piuttosto comuni negli Stati Uniti, dove il legname non manca e costa poco.fraternity house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. US (male college students' residence)(college americano: residence per studenti)confraternita nfFraternity houses are a uniquely American phenomenon, I believe.Credo che le confraternite siano un fenomeno tipicamente americano.free house UK (type of tavern)pub nmNota: non legato a una particolare fabbrica di birrafreestanding house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (home: detached)casa indipendente nfvilletta indipendente nffront of house platea nffront of the house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (faade of residential building, house front)facciata nfThe front of the house mimicked a Neo-Gothic facade.La facciata della casa ricalcava lo stile Neogotico.front of the house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (rooms towards front of a house)davanti alla casa avvWhenever I come in the back door my dog runs from the front of the house to greet me.full house tutto esaurito full house (poker)full nmfun house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (attraction at fair or amusement park)(luna park: attrazioni percorse a piedi)casa degli specchi, labirinto degli specchi, casa dei divertimenti nffurnished house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (rental property with furniture)casa ammobiliata, casa gi ammobiliata nfI'm going to be there for three months so it will be worth it to rent a furnished house.Star l solo tre mesi, quindi preferirei affittare una casa ammobiliat.gambling house casa da gioco; bisca garden house casa estiva garrison house presidio nmgingerbread house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (edible confectionery structure)casa di pan di zenzero nfglass house serra nfglass-house di serra guard-house corpo di guardia guest house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (small hotel)(piccolo albergo)pensione nf(a gestione familiare)albergo nmMy parents stayed in a nearby guest house while visiting us for three weeks.guest house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (outbuilding for guests)appartamento per gli ospiti nmGrandma and Grandpa will stay in the guest house when they visit.halfway house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. informal (residence for ex-prisoners, etc.)casa di accoglienza per ex detenuti nfhash house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. US, slang (cheap restaurant)tavola calda, trattoria alla buona, trattoria senza pretese nfI ate dinner in a hash house near the station.Ho cenato in una tavola calda vicino alla stazione.ristorantino alla buona, ristorante a buon prezzo nmhaunted house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (house occupied by a ghost)casa stregata nfcasa infestata dagli spiriti, casa infestata dai fantasmi nfStrange noises came from the haunted house late at night.A notte fonda dalla casa stregata arrivano strani rumori.A notte fonda dalla casa infestata dagli spiriti arrivano strani rumori.haunted house nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (fairground attraction)(al luna park)casa delle streghe, casa dei fantasmi nfThe two girls came out of the haunted house shrieking and giggling.Le due ragazze uscirono dalla casa delle streghe gridando e ridendo.head house struttura in cui collocato il castelletto di una miniera hen-house pollaio nmhot-house serra riscaldata nf(figurato)terreno di coltura nmhouse agent nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. UK (estate agent)agente immobiliare nmNota: Estate agent is much more common in this context.house and grounds casa e terreno circostante house and lot casa e terreno circostante house arrest nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (imprisonment in one's home)arresti domiciliari nmplThe Burmese political dissident was under house arrest for many years.Il dissidente politico birmano fu tenuto agli arresti domiciliari per molti anni.house call (professional visit)visita a domicilio nfhouse cat nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (domestic feline, pet cat)felino domestico, gatto domestico nmA lion is a wild cat, not a house cat.house cleaner nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. ([sb] employed to do domestic cleaning)(donna)donna delle pulizie nfLa nonna da giovane faceva la donna delle pulizie, che era uno dei pochi lavori che le era permesso fare.house clearance nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (service: clearing possessions)(da casa, per vendita)rimozione dei mobili nfhouse counsel legale di un'impresa house counsel (law)giurista d'impresa nmhouse detective addetto alla sicurezza house detective US (security guard)addetto alla sicurezza nmhouse divided against itself casa divisa da lotte intestine house doctor nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (physician: lives on site)medico interno nmhouse dog nnoun: Refers to person, place, thing, quality, etc. (domestic canine, pet dog)cane domestico nmOne of the best house dogs, in the opinion of some people, is the poodle.house finch ciuffolotto messicano house flag bandiera della casa (cio di una societ) nfhouse flag (nautical)bandiera della casa nfhouse furnishings mobilio nm 'house' found in these entries

In the English description: Italiano: http://www.wordreference.com/enit/house