FATHER COFFEY: (Yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak.) Namine. Jacobs. Vobiscuits. Amen.
JOHN O’CONNELL: (Foghorns stormily through his megaphone.) Dignam, Patrick T, deceased.
PADDY DIGNAM: (With pricked up ears, winces.) Overtones. (He wriggles forward and places an ear to the ground.) My master’s voice!
JOHN O’CONNELL: Burial docket letter number U. P. eightyfive thousand. Field seventeen. House of Keys. Plot, one hundred and one.
(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tail stiffpointed, his ears cocked.)
PADDY DIGNAM: Pray for the repose of his soul.
(He worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace. Dignam’s voice, muffled, is heard baying under ground: Dignam’s dead and gone below. Tom Rochford, robinredbreasted, in cap and breeches, jumps from his twocolumned machine.)
TOM ROCHFORD: (A hand to his breastbone, bows.) Reuben J. A florin I find him. (He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare.) My turn now on. Follow me up to Carlow.
(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble, eyes of nought. All recedes. Bloom plodges forward again through the sump. Kisses chirp amid the rifts of fog. A piano sounds. He stands before a lighted house, listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers, fly about him, twittering, warbling, cooing.)
THE KISSES: (Warbling.) Leo! (Twittering.) Icky licky micky sticky for Leo! (Cooing.) Coo coocoo! Yummyyum, Womwom! (Warbling.) Big comebig! Pirouette! Leopopold! (Twittering.) Leeolee! (Warbling.) O Leo!