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 gleamed with cold wet lustre.  The towels with which they smacked their bodies were heavy with cold seawater; and drenched with cold brine was their matted hair.

He stood still in deference to their calls and parried their banter with easy words.  How characterless they looked:  Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar, Ennis without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp, and Connolly without his Norfolk coat with the flapless side-pockets!  It was a pain to see them, and a sword-like pain to see the signs of adolescence that made repellent their pitiable nakedness.  Perhaps they had taken refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls.  But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in what dread he stood of the mystery of his own body.

—­Stephanos Dedalos!  Bous Stephanoumenos!  Bous Stephaneforos!

Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty.  Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy.  So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him.  A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped City.  Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the