As for Slothrop, he ends up coming between the round shuddering tits of a Viennese girl with hair the color of a lioness’s pelt and emerald eyes with lashes thick as fur, his sperm surging out into the hollow of her arched throat and among all the diamonds of her necklace, burning agelessly through the haze of his seed—and it feels, at least, like everybody came together, though how could that be? He does notice that the only person not connected, aside from Antoni and Stefania, seems to be the Jap liaison man, who’s been sitting alone, one deck up, watching. Not masturbating or anything, just watching, watching the river, the night… well, they’re pretty inscrutable, you know, those Japs.

There is a general withdrawing from orifices after a while, drinking, doping and gabbing resume, and many begin to drift away to catch some sleep. Here and there a couple or threesome linger. A C-melody saxophone player has the bell of his instrument snuggled between the widespread thighs of a pretty matron in sunglasses, yes sunglasses at night, this is some degenerate company Slothrop has fallen in with all right—the saxman is playing “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” and those vibrations are just driving her wild. A girl with an enormous glass dildo inside which baby piranhas are swimming in some kind of decadent lavender medium amuses herself between the buttocks of a stout transvestite in lace stockings and a dyed sable coat. A Montenegran countess is being fucked simultaneously in her chignon and her navel by a pair of octogenarians who wear only jackboots and are carrying on some sort of technical discussion in what seems to be ecclesiatical Latin.

The sun is still hours away, down the vast unreadable underslope of Russia. Fog closes in, and the engines slow. Wrecks slide away under the keel of the white ship. Springtime corpses caught in the wreckage twist and flow as the Anubis moves by overhead. Under the bowsprit, the golden jackal, the only being aboard that can see through the fog, stares ahead, down the river, toward Swinemünde.

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Slothrop here’s been dreaming about Llandudno, where he spent a rainy furlough once drinking bitter in bed with a tug skipper’s daughter. Also where Lewis Carroll wrote that Alice in Wonderland. So, they put up a statue of the White Rabbit in Llandudno. White Rabbit’s been talking to Slothrop, serious and crucial talk, but on the way up to waking he loses it all, as usual. He lies staring at ducts and raceways overhead, asbestos-covered elbows, pipes, gages, tanks, switchboards, flanges, unions, valve-wheels and all their thickets of shadow. It’s noisy as hell. Sunlight filters down the hatches, so that must mean it’s morning. In a corner of his vision now, he catches a flutter of red.

“You mustn’t tell Margherita. Please.” That Bianca. Hair down to her hips, cheeks smudged, eyes hot. “She’ll kill me.”