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bridled and mounted by a light of love.
LYNCH: Ba!
STEPHEN: Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate
a loaf and a jug? This movement illustrates the loaf and jug
of bread or wine in Omar. Hold my stick.
LYNCH: Damn your yellow stick. Where are we going?
STEPHEN: Lecherous lynx, to la belle dame sans mer-
ci, Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem
meam.
(Stephen thrusts the ashplant on him and slowly holds out
his hands, his head going back till both hands are a span from
his breast, down turned, in planes intersecting, the fingers
about to part, the left being higher.)
LYNCH: Which is the jug of bread? It skills not. That
or the customhouse. Illustrate thou. Here take your crutch
and walk.
(They pass. Tommy Caffrey scrambles to a gaslamp and,
clasping, climbs in spasms. From the top spur he slides down.
Jacky Caffrey clasps to climb. The navvy lurches against the
lamp. The twins scuttle off in the dark. The navvy, swaying,
presses a forefinger against a wing of his nose and ejects from
the farther nostril a long liquid jet of snot. Shouldering the
lamp he staggers away through the crowd with his flaring
cresset.
Snakes of river fog creep slowly. From drains, clefts, cess-
pools, middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes. A glow
leaps in the south beyond the seaward reaches of the river.
The navvy, staggering forward, cleaves the crowd and lurches
towards the tramsiding on the farther side under the railway