etchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it
to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet, wild
perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high prices too,
Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times.
Must be without a flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar,
Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside at Jaffa,
chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them barefoot in
soiled dungarees. There's whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn't
see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back is like that
Norwegian captain's. Wonder if I'll meet him today. Watering cart. To
provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.

No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead
sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those
waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it
raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead
names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the
oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's, clutching a
naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over
all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born
everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old
woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

Desolation.

Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned
into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins,
chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I am here
now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of
the bed. Must begin again those Sandow's exercises. On the hands down.
Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why is that?
Valuation is only twenty-eight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur:
parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore eye. To smell
the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her
ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.

Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim
sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a
girl with gold hair on the wind.

Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered
them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quickened heart slow