to him, the air was chilled and, looking askance
towards the water, he saw a flying squall darkening and crisping
suddenly the tide. A faint click at his heart, a faint throb in his
throat told him once more of how his flesh dreaded the cold infrahuman
odour of the sea; yet he did not strike across the downs on his left
but held straight on along the spine of rocks that pointed against the
river's mouth.

A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the
river was embayed. In the distance along the course of the slow-flowing
Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim
fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras,
old as man's weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom
was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor
less patient of subjection than in the days of the thingmote.

Disheartened, he raised his eyes towards the slow-drifting clouds,
dappled and seaborne. They were voyaging across the deserts of the sky,
a host of nomads on the march, voyaging high over Ireland, westward
bound. The Europe they had come from lay out there beyond the Irish
Sea, Europe of strange tongues and valleyed and woodbegirt and
citadelled and of entrenched and marshalled races. He heard a confused
music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious
of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed to
recede, to recede, to recede, and from each receding trail of nebulous
music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a
star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the
world was calling.

--Hello, Stephanos!

--Here comes The Dedalus!

--Ao!... Eh, give it over, Dwyer, I'm telling you, or I'll give you a stuff
in the kisser for yourself... Ao!

--Good man, Towser! Duck him!

--Come along, Dedalus! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!

--Duck him! Guzzle him now, Towser!

--Help! Help!... Ao!

He recognized their speech collectively before he distinguished their
faces. The mere sight of that medley of wet nakedness chilled him to
the bone. Their bodies, corpse-white or suffused with a pallid golden
light or rawly tanned by the sun, gleamed with the wet of the sea.
Their diving-stone, poised on its rude supports and rocking under their
plunges, and the rough-hewn stones of the sloping breakwater over which
they scrambled in their horseplay gleame