breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted them, 
     walking warily. A porter bottle stood up, stogged to its 
     waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful 
     thirst.

From meditation on books and libraries, that is, Stephen 
Dedalus turns to the message in the bottle, reaching it through 
a riot of audile-tactile-olfactory experience carefully 
counterpointed with the subjective vistas of authors, libraries, 
and literary immortality.

     The theme of eternizing by means of the printed word had 
great plausibility in the early period of typography when so 
many forgotten and unknown writers of the past ages were 
being brought into a new and far more intense life, by 
typography, than they had ever known in their actual scribal