gazes in the tawny crystal of her
eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens.)_

ZOE: You'll know me the next time.

BLOOM: _(Forlornly)_ I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to...

_(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round
their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong
hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by
the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity nude, white,
still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth
roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes,
strangely murmuring.)_

ZOE: _(Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously
smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater) Schorach ani wenowach,
benoith Hierushaloim._

BLOOM: _(Fascinated)_ I thought you were of good stock by your accent.

ZOE: And you know what thought did?

_(She bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth, sending on
him a cloying breath of stale garlic. The roses draw apart, disclose a
sepulchre of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)_

BLOOM: _(Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat
awkward hand)_ Are you a Dublin girl?

ZOE: _(Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil)_ No bloody
fear. I'm English. Have you a swaggerroot?

BLOOM: _(As before)_ Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish
device. _(Lewdly)_ The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder
of rank weed.

ZOE: Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.

BLOOM: _(In workman's corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating
tie and apache cap)_ Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Ralegh brought
from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of
pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart,
memory, will understanding, all. That is to say he brought the poison
a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the
food. Suicide. Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life!

_(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)_

THE CHIMES: Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin!

BLOOM: _(In alderman's gown and chain)_ Electors of Arran Quay, Inns
Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline, I say,
from the cattlemarket to the river. That's the music of the future.
That's my programme. _Cui bono_? But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in
their phantom ship of finance...

A