Barnes. Pdf

6. THE MOUNTAIN 
[p. 143] 
T
ICK
, tick, tick, tick. Tock. Tick, tick, tick, tick. Tock. It sounded like a clock gently misfiring, time entering a delirium. This 
might have been appropriate, the Colonel reflected, but it wasn't the case. It was important to stick to what you knew, right to 
the end, especially at the end. He knew it wasn't the case. It wasn't time, it wasn't even a distant clock. 
Colonel Fergusson lay in the cold square bedroom of his cold square house three miles outside Dublin and listened to the 
clicking overhead. It was one o'clock in the morning on a windless November night of 1837. His daughter Amanda sat at his 
bedside in stiff, pout-tipped profile, reading some piece of religious mumbo-jumbo. At her elbow the candle burned with a 
steady flame, which was more than that perspiring fool of a doctor with letters after his name had been able to say about the 
Colonel's heart. 
It was a provocation, that's what it was, thought the Colonel. Here he was on his deathbed, preparing for oblivion, and she 
sits over there reading Parson Noah's latest pamphlet. Actively disagreeing right to the end. Colonel Fergusson had long since 
given up trying to understand the business. How could the child he loved most have failed to inherit either his instincts or the 
opinions he had with such difficulty acquired? It was vexing. If he hadn't adored her he would have treated her as a credulous 
imbecile. And still, despite it all, despite this living, fleshly rebuttal, he believed in the world's ability to progress, in man's 
ascent, in the defeat of superstition. It was all finally very puzzling. 
Tick, tick, tick, tick. Tock. The clicking continued overhead. Four, five loud ticks, a silence, then a fainter echo. The Colonel 
[p. 144]
could tell that the noise was distracting Amanda from her pamphlet, though she gave no outward sign. It was simply that he 
could judge such things after living so closely with her for however many years. He could tell she hadn't really got her nose in 
the Reverend Abraham. And it was her fault that he could tell, that he knew her so thoroughly. He'd told her to go off and get 
married when that lieutenant whose name he could never recall had asked her. She'd argued about that, too. She'd said she 
loved her father more than her uniformed claimant. He'd replied that this wasn't a sound reason, and anyway he'd only die on 
her. She'd wept and said he wasn't to talk like that. But he'd been right, hadn't he? He was bound to be, wasn't he? 
Amanda Fergusson now rested her book on her lap and looked at the ceiling in alarm. The beetle was a harbinger. 
Everyone knew that its sound portended the death of someone in the house within the year. It was the wisdom of ages. She 
looked across to see if her father was still awake. Colonel Fergusson had his eyes closed and was breathing out through his 
nose in long smooth puffs like a bellows. But Amanda knew him well enough to suspect that he might be bluffing. It would be 
just like him. He had always played tricks on her. 
Like that time he'd taken her to Dublin, one blustery day in February of 1821. Amanda was seventeen, and everywhere 
carried with her a sketching book as she now carried her religious pamphlets. She had lately been excited by reports of the 
exhibition at Bullock's Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, of Monsieur Jerricault's Great Picture, 24 feet long by 18 feet 
high, representing the Surviving Crew of the Medusa French Frigate on the Raft. Admission 1s, Description 6d, and 50,000 
spectators had paid to see this new masterpiece of foreign art, shown alongside such permanent displays as Mr Bullock's 
magnificent collection of 25,000 fossils and his Pantherion of stuffed wild beasts. Now the canvas had come to Dublin, where 
it was put on view at the Rotunda: Admission 1s 8d, Description 5d. 
Amanda had been chosen above her five siblings by reason of her precocity with water-colour - at least, this was Colonel 
[p. 145] 
Fergusson's official excuse for indulging his natural preference once again. Except that they did not go, as promised, to the 
Rotunda, but went instead to a rival attraction advertised in Saunder's News-Letter & Daily Advertiser: one, indeed, which 
ensured that Monsieur Jerricault's Great Picture did not triumph in Dublin as it had done in London. Colonel Fergusson took 
his daughter to the Pavilion, where they witnessed Messrs Marshall's Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Wreck of the 
Medusa French Frigate and the Fatal Raft: Admission front seats 1s 8d, back seats 10d, children in the front seats at half price. 
`The Pavilion is always rendered perfectly comfortable by patent stoves’. 
Whereas the Rotunda displayed a mere twenty-four feet by eighteen of stationary pigment, here they were offered some 
10,000 square feet of mobile canvas. Before their eyes an immense picture, or series of pictures, gradually unwound: not just 
one scene, but the entire history of the shipwreck passed before them. Episode succeeded episode, while coloured lights played 
upon the unreeling fabric, and an orchestra emphasized the drama of events. The audience was constantly moved to applause 
by the spectacle, and Colonel Fergusson would nudge his daughter heavily at some particularly felicitous aspect of the display. 
In the sixth scene those poor French wretches on the raft were represented in very much the same posture as that in which they 
had been first delineated by Monsieur Jerricault. But how much grander, Colonel Fergusson observed, to picture their tragic 
plight with movement and coloured lights, accompanied by music which he identified quite unnecessarily to his daughter as 
`Vive Henrico!' 
`That is the way forward,' remarked the Colonel with enthusiasm as they left the Pavilion. `Those painters will have to look 
to their brushes.' 

---

J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½