apparent to a Celtic cassian line came the early kings of Munster (from chief. 300 c.E. on). Arthur Griffith (1872- 1922) was an 2. District in east-central London. Stephen is Irish revolutionary leader, founder of the Sinn Fein recalling Egan's conversation about the Fenian vio(' Ourselves Alone') movement. lence in London that necessitated his fleeing to 4. Edouard Drumont (1844-1917), French poli-France. tician and bitter anti-Semite. 3. I.e., Egan's wife, who is 'quite nicey comfy' in 5. 19th-century French statesman. 'Maud the metaphorical 'rue Git-le-Caeur' (i.e., the street Gonne,' the beautiful actress and violent Irish where the heart lies dead) back home in Ireland. nationalist whom W. B. Yeats loved. 'La Patrie': 4. Patrice, Egan's son. journal edited by Lucien Millevoye, French nation-5. Kilkenny is called after the Irish Saint Canice alist deputy and Maud Gonne's lover. (its Irish name is Cill Chainnigh), on the river 6. Maid-of-all-work (French). 'Froeken': froken, Nore, where Strongbow (the second earl of Pemunmarried woman or Miss (Swedish). broke, who invaded Ireland in the 1 2th century), 7. I do all the gentlemen (in broken French). had his stronghold. 8. Another Protean theme of change. Egan had 6. James Napper Tandy (1740-1803), Irish revotold Stephen of his cousin James Stephens's lutionary hero of the song 'The Wearing of the escape from prison disguised as a bride. Green.'
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220 8 / JAMES JOYCE
O, O the bcr)'s of Kilkenny . . .
Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them. Remembering thee, O Sion.7
He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots. The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of seeds of brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship, am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking soil. Turn back.
Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower8 waits. Through the barbicans9 the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. Who to clear it? He has the key.1 I will not sleep there when this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their blind bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer.2 Call: no answer. He lifted his feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon's midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood.3
The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a grike.4
A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensahles Louis Veuillot called Gautier's6 prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. And there, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout's toys. Mind you don't get one bang on the ear. I'm the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz oldz an Iridzman.7
A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand. Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not be master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From farther away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures, two. The two maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes. Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?
Galleys of the Lochlanns8 ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their blood- beaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings, tores of toma
7. Cf. Psalm 137.1 (in the King James Bible): 'we wept, when we remembered Zion.' But 'Zion' in the Douay (Roman Catholic) Bible, is spelled 'Sion,' and the Book of Common Prayer has 'When we remembered thee, O Sion.' 8. Where Stephen lived with Buck Mulligan. 9. Outworks of a castle. 1. In the preceding episode Mulligan asked for and got the key of the tower from Stephen. 2. I.e., Mulligan and the Englishman Haines, who lived with Stephen in the tower. Stephen thinks of them as calling for him in vain, because he has decided not to return. 3. Cf. Hamlet 1.2.241, where the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father is described as having a beard of 'sable silver'd.' 4. Chink, crevice. 5. A coach embedded in the sand (French). 6. Theophile Gautier, 19th-century French poet, novelist, and critic. Veuillot, 19th-century French journalist. 7. Stephen is thinking of the boulders on the shore as the work of a large but clumsy giant ('Sir Lout'). 'They [Sir Lout and his family] were giants right enough. . . . My Sir Lout has rocks in his mouth instead of teeth. He articulates badly' (Joyce to Frank Budgen, reported in Budgen's James Joy ce and the Making of Ulysses, 1934). 8. Scandinavians (Gaelic). Stephen is meditating on the Vikings who settled Dublin; it was here that they came ashore, he thinks. Malachi (below), king of Meath, had their first leader drowned.
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ULYSSES [PROTEUS] / 220 9
hawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers' knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.
The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. Terribilia meditans.9 A primrose doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The Bruce's brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck, York's false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion crowned.1 All kings' sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved men from drowning2 and you shake at a cur's yelping. But the courtiers who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house. House of . . . We don't want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. Natiirlich,3 put there for you. Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden's rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can't see! Who's behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sands quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I . . . With him together down .. . I could not save her.4 Waters: bitter death: lost.
A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.
Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling
