Barnes. Pdf

 
Chapters 
54
Miss Logan and the Kurd took turns watching over her that night. The moon, now almost full, illuminated the floor of the 
cave where Amanda Fergusson lay. `My father would have 
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wanted music with it,' she said at one point. Miss Logan smiled an agreement which irritated her employer. `You cannot 
possibly know to what I am referring.' Miss Logan immediately agreed a second time. 
There was a silence. The dry cold air was scented with woodsmoke. `He thought pictures should move. With lights and 
music and patent stoves. He thought that was the future.' Miss Logan, little better informed than before, considered it safest not 
to respond. `But it was not the future. Look at the moon. The moon does not require music and coloured lights.' 
Miss Logan did win one small, final argument - by forceful gesture rather than words - and Miss Fergusson was left with 
both bottles of molten snow. She also accepted a couple of lemons. At daybreak Miss Logan, now wearing the pistol at her 
belt, set off down the mountain with the guide. She felt resolved in spirit but uncertain how best to proceed. She imagined, for 
instance, that if the inhabitants of Arghuri had been unwilling to venture on to the mountain before the earthquake, any 
survivors would scarcely be ready to do so now. She might be compelled to seek help in a more distant village. 
The horses were gone. The Kurd made a long noise in his throat which she presumed to indicate disappointment. The tree 
to which they had been tethered was still there, but the horses had disappeared. Miss Logan imagined them panicking as the 
ground raged beneath them, tearing themselves free and violently bearing away their hobbles as they fled from the mountain. 
Later, as she trudged behind the Kurd towards the village of Arghuri, Miss Logan envisaged an alternative explanation: the 
horses being stolen by those hospitable nomads encountered that first morning. 
The Monastery of Saint James had been quite destroyed, and they passed it without halting. As they neared the ruins of 
Arghuri, the Kurd indicated that Miss Logan was to wait for him while he investigated the village. Twenty minutes later he 
returned, shaking his head in a universal gesture. As they skirted the wrecked houses, Miss Logan could not help observing to 
herself that the earthquake had killed all the inhabitants 
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while leaving intact those vines which - if Miss Fergusson should be believed - were the very source of their temptation and 
their punishment. 
It took them two days before they reached human habitation. In a hill village to the south-west, the guide delivered her to 
the house of an Armenian priest who spoke passable French. She explained the need to raise an immediate rescue party and 
return to Great Ararat. The priest replied that no doubt the Kurd was organizing the relief at that very moment. Something in 
his demeanour indicated that perhaps he did not quite believe her story of having climbed most of the way up Massis, which 
peasants and holy men alike knew to be inaccessible. 
She waited all day for the Kurd to return, but he failed to do so; and when she made enquiries the next morning she was 
told that he had left the town within minutes of conducting her to the priest's house. Miss Logan was angry and distressed at 
such Judas-like behaviour, and expressed herself forcibly on the subject to the Armenian priest, who nodded and offered to say 
prayers for Miss Fergusson. Miss Logan accepted, while wondering about the efficacy of mere unadorned prayer in a region 
where people yielded up their teeth as votive offerings. 
Only several weeks later, as she lay stifling in her cabin on a filthy steamer from Trebizond, did she reflect that the Kurd, in 
the whole time he had been with them, had executed Miss Fergusson's commands with punctiliousness and honour; further, 
that she had no means of knowing what had passed between the two of them that last night in the cave. Perhaps Miss 
Fergusson had instructed the guide to lead her companion to a place of safety, and then desert. 
Miss Logan also reflected upon Miss Fergusson's fall. They had been crossing a scree; there had been many loose stones, 
and footing was difficult, but surely at that point they had been traversing a gentler slope, and her employer had actually been 
standing on a flattish stretch of granite when she had fallen. It was a magnetic mountain where a compass did not work, and it 
was easy to lose your bearing. No, that was not it. The question she was avoiding was whether Miss Fergusson might not have 
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been the instrument of her own precipitation, in order to achieve or confirm whatever it was she wanted to achieve or 
confirm. Miss Fergusson had maintained, when they first stood before the haloed mountain, that there were two explanations 
of everything, that each required the exercise of faith, and that we had been given free will in order that we might choose 
between them. This dilemma was to preoccupy Miss Logan for years to come. 
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