What
in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water,
watercarrier returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic
equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness
in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity
in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the
restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points
of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states
of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its
hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after
devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic:
its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance
of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending
in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of
Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its
luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution
all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious
metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories:
its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and
density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation
of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular
ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing
rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north
and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts,
artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells,
watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms,
inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal
curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed
by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the
hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew:
the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with
one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the
waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies,
inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching
thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm
and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow,
hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and
bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos
and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries
and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility
in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos,
electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility
in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality
derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling
from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe)
numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity
as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia
in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant
pools in the waning moon. - James Joyce
