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Show 270 of her mouth and eyes, and he was pleased every time she blew her nose and then groped for the brown grocery sack in which she had stuffed the day's used kleenexes. They had more or less written Richard off, and no longer tried very hard to arrange an evening invitation when he would be home, instead concentrating their heavy guns on Alice alone. Little by little it was happening. The big problem was getting her through the Book of Mormon. She liked the idea of a mysterious vanished civilization, with its cities and highways and temples, its catastrophes and earthquakes, its inhabitants receiving strange messages from supernatural visitors, but she kept getting stalled on the wherefores and it came to passes. The long stretches of straight doctrinal writing by Alma, Mosiah, one Nephi or another, Samuel the Lamanite, Mormon himself or his son Moroni, were more than she could handle with any kind of attention. It was necessary to mention from time to time, as a way of keeping the spark lit, that the city of Zarahemla, for instance, had been found and dug up by archaeologists, exactly where the Book of Mormon had said it would be; that other cities, roads, great walls, fortifications and so forth, the very ones she was reading about, were periodically discovered tucked into high valleys and clinging to concealed mountain walls in South and Central America, and that explorers constantly reported finding tiny, squalid tribes of white Indians living in isolated settlements in the jungles, presumably descendants of the few survivors of the destroyed Nephite nation. While she struggled through the book, they pressed on. They talked about the Urim and Thummim, the transparent stones buried with the plates and used by Joseph Smith to translate the hieroglyphs, using a process that she found unfortunately funny. They talked about Kolob, an astronomical body of some kind mentioned in the Book of Abraham, that was located in |