"Binomeans to be comprendered."

(284.5-286.2)  It's kind of funny how one day I feel like things are beginning to make sense to me, and a couple of days later I'm flailing through a passage about which Campbell and Robinson write, "These last two pages are intentionally very obscure."

These two pages begin with another example of a geometry problem that Kevin finds challenging.  This one seems to involve calculated something related to a triangle, one side of which is the height of a telegraph pole.  A little bit later, we see the answers to these questions in the "teacher's only" section of the children's textbook:  "Answers (for teasers only).  Ten twent, thirt, see, ex and three icky totchy ones."  But seeing the answers is of little use to those of us who can't even figure out what the questions are.

Moving along, I get the sense that these complex math problems are related to the familiar story of HCE's fall.  After all, we do see another appearance of the two young women, the three soldiers, HCE, and ALP:  "It follows that, if the two antesedents be bissyclitties and the three comeseekwenchers trundletrikes, then, Aysha Lalipat behidden on the footplate, Big Whiggler restant upsittuponable . . . ."  As that sentence continues, we see HCE win ALP's hand in marriage and his eventual fall (best summarized in the parenthetical:  "(he wins her hend!  he falls to tail!)") leading to "a rainborne pamtomomiom," which is both a spectacular rainbow pantomime and a depressing rainfall of sheer pandemonium.  As noted by McHugh, this leads a countdown from 12 to 1 in Finnish ("kaksitoisa volts yksitoista volts kymmenen . . . "), which is both the countdown to an inevitable zero, or death, and 12 factorial (i.e., 12 multiplied by 11 multiplied by 10, etc.), which is the huge number 479,001,600.  I think that this is an example of HCE as everyman -- both a sinner doomed to die and a father who gives life to millions.

This reading plays right into the final line of today's passage:  "Equal to = aosch."  HCE is the alpha (the beginning, or the father) the omega (the end, or the human doomed to die), and the chaos ("aosch" unscrambled) in between (the seemingly random and uncontainable events of both history and a human life).  Of course, to recycle the words of Campbell and Robinson when reflecting on their own interpretation of today's reading, my "rendering is necessarily a long shot."