"Push up and push vardar and come to uphill headquarters!"

(202.4-204.20)  Today's passage was another challenging, yet fascinating one.  And once again, after going through the process of moving from overwhelming confusion to the point where a dim light of understanding went on, I realized that sometimes the more challenging the Wake gets, the more rewarding it ends up being.  Done with discussing ALP's children, the washerwomen move on to the subject of ALP's own promiscuity.  One says, "She must have been a gadabount in her day, so she must, more than most."  She went all the way from the river's source to the ocean, one woman says, "[c]asting her perils before our swains."  But, one asks, who was ALP's first lover?  The short, but completely vague, answer is, "Someone he was, whuebra they were, in a tactic attack or in single combat."

It turns out that ALP herself doesn't really know the man's identity:  "She sid herself she hardly knows whuon the annals her graveller was, a dynast of Leinster, a wolf of the sea, or what he did or how blyth she played or how, when, why, where and who offon he jumpnad her and how it was gave her away."  One woman says that the man was "a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees."  

But the other disagrees:  "You're wrong there, corribly wrong!"  She continues, "It was ages behind that when nullahs were nowhere."  This begins a brilliant passage in which the women (as pointed out by Campbell and Robinson) roughly trace the course of the Liffey backward toward its source.  At the same time, they're also tracing ALP's personal progression back from a sexually active adult to a blossoming young woman to an innocent child.  They move immediately back in time from the lieabroad of a Curraghman to "county Wickenlow, garden of Erin, before she ever dreamt she'd lave Kilbridge and go foaming under Horsepass bridge."  Back in "the dinkel dale of Luggelaw" (where McHugh says Saint Kevin spent some time), she had a romantic encounter with "a local heremite, Michael Arklow."  Entranced by ALP, Arklow "plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it."  This is Akrlow both dipping his hand in the stream and running them through ALP's hair.  Aroused, Akrlow "had to forget the monk in the man so, rubbing her up and smoothing her down, he baised his lippes in smiling mood, kiss akiss after kisokushk (as he warned her niver to, niver to, nevar) on Anna-na-Poghue's of the freckled forehead."  This encounter profoundly moved ALP, who thereafter rose two feet higher in her own estimation "[a]nd steppes on stilts ever since."

But before Arklow, "[t]wo lads in scoutsch breeches went through her."  These two lads -- Barefoot Burn (I wonder if this is the Scot, Robert Burns?) and Wallowme Wade -- had their encounters (which aren't described in any detail) before ALP, the person, hit puberty ("before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler") and before ALP, the river, had reached a point where she could support large ships ("a bulgic porterhouse barge").  And before that, she was playfully licked by a hound when she was "too faint to buoy the fairest rider, too frail to flirt with a cygnet's plume."  Finally, when she was just a slight trickle at the river's source, "she laughed innocefree with her limbs aloft and a whole drove of maiden hawthorns blushing and looking askance upon her."  All in all, these two pages serve as reminders of Joyce's brilliance.