Barnes. Pdf

(mustard! said Betty to Spike, I suppose he eats primroses on the side with his beef). When they got home that night Spike 
seemed all charged up, like she hadn't seen him for a year or so, and there wasn't any question of him tucking off with his Bible 
on the back porch beneath the stars; no, he fair hustled her into the bedroom, where they hadn't done much else but sleep for 
quite a while, and Betty, who though unprepared for this event was not at all displeased, muttered something in their private 
code about the bathroom, but Spike said they wouldn't be bothering over that, and Betty quite liked him being this masterful. 
'I love you,' said Spike later that night. 
A few inches in the Fayetteville Observer begat a feature in the Greensboro News and Record which begat a small 
syndicated news item. After that there was silence, but Spike remained confident and recalled the bonfires he used to watch as 
a kid when it looked like nothing was happening until the whole thing burst into flame; and sure enough he was right, for 
suddenly he blazed across the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Then the TV people arrived, which 
set off another round of newsmen, followed by foreign TV and foreign newsmen, and all the time Betty and Spike worked hard 
(they were a team again, like at the beginning) to get Project Ararat under way. Reporters were given fact-sheets itemizing the 

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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½
 
Chapters 
84
latest contributions and endorsements, whether it was fifty dollars from a neighboring congregation, or a gift of ropes and tents 
from a well-known store. Soon there arose on Spike and Betty's front lawn a large wooden campaign thermometer; every 
Monday morning Spike, paintbrush in hand, inched up the mercury. 
Not surprisingly, Spike and Betty liked to compare this critical time to the launch of a rocket: the countdown is 
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exciting, the moment of ignition a thrill, but until you see that heavy mother of a silver tube starting to shift on her haunches 
and shoulder her way toward the heavens you know there is always a chance that you're in for an embarrassing and very public 
floperoo. Whatever Betty wanted, now she had decided to back her husband one hundred ten per cent, she didn't want that. 
Betty was not of a particularly religious nature, and in her private heart she didn't know what to make of Spike's experience on 
the moon; but she recognized possibilities when she saw them. After a year of moody Bible study and her friends being so 
damn sympathetic she could scream, it wasn't so bad that Spike Tiggler was back in the news again. After Project Apollo, 
Project Ararat - what could be more obvious than this progression, this tiny alphabetical step? And nobody, not one of the 
newspapers, had even suggested that Spike might be minus some buttons, crazier than a bedbug. 
Spike handled it all pretty well, and never once mentioned how God had played President Kennedy in getting the whole 
thing rolling. This made it easier for Betty to interest people who might have been cautious if they'd sniffed anything nutsy in 
the scheme. Even the Governor of North Carolina was moved to forgive Spike's brusque curiosity about the authenticity of his 
faith and benevolently agreed to top-table a $100-a-plate fund-raising dinner in Charlotte. Betty wore primrose yellow on such 
occasions with a regularity which friends deemed unnecessary, not to say unfashionable; but Spike maintained that it was his 
lucky color. When talking to reporters Spike sometimes asked them to mention his wife's dress, which was mustard in color, as 
they no doubt had observed. Some newsmen, either lazy or color-blind, dutifully obliged, which made Spike chuckle when he 
read the papers. 
He also guested on a number of religious TV shows. Betty would sometimes quiver with apprehension as yet another 
salesman in a three-piece suit cued in from the commercial break with the welcoming announcement that God's love was like 
the still center of a whirlwind, and one of his guests here today had actually been inside a whirlwind and could testify to 
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the perfect peace within it, but how this meant that Christianity was a faith which kept you moving forward all the time, since 
you can't stand still in a whirlwind, which brought us to his second guest, Spike Tiggler, who had in his time traveled even 
faster than a whirlwind but was now looking for that still center, that perfect calm, praise the Lord. And Spike, who had gone 
back to his astronaut's haircut and blue suit, would keep on answering politely and never once mention - as the salesman would 
have loved to hear - that God had been right there, inside his helmet, whispering in his ear. He came across as good and simple 
and true, which helped the checks roll in to Project Ararat, care of Betty Tiggler, who naturally paid herself a salary. 
They set up a committee: the Reverend Lance Gibson, respected or at least known through most of the state, a touch 
fundamentalist for some but not too left-field to scare away sensible money; Dr Jimmy Fulgood, college basketball star turned 
geologist and scuba-diver, who would give scientific respectability to the expedition; and Betty herself, chairperson, co-
ordinator and treasurer. The Governor agreed to feature on the writing paper as Emeritus Patron; and the only glitch in the 
whole Ararat countdown was the failure to get the Project recognized as a charitable institution. 
Some of the journalists with book-learning behind them liked to ask Spike how he could be entirely sure that the Ark was 
to be found on Mount Ararat. Did not the Koran say it made landfall on Mount Judi, several hundred kilometers away, near the 
Iraqi border? And did not Jewish tradition equally differ, placing the location somewhere in Northern Israel? At which point 
Spike would give a little touch on the charm throttle and reply that everyone was of course entitled to their opinion, and if an 
Israeli astronaut wanted to go looking in Israel that was fine by him, and if a Koranic astronaut did the game in Iraq, that was 
fine too. Sceptical reporters went away thinking that Tiggler might be simple, but he wasn't simple-minded. 
Another question occasionally put was whether the Ark - assuming its theoretical location could be found - might not 
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have rotted away over the last however many thousand years, or been eaten by termites. Once again, Spike would not be 
drawn, especially not into revealing how he knew it couldn't have rotted or been eaten by termites, because God's command to 
find the Ark clearly implied that there was something left of it. Instead, he referred the questioner to his Bible, which the 
questioner appeared to have come without, but which would reveal that the Ark was made of gopher-wood, which everyone 
agreed was extremely hard, and therefore probably resistant to both rot and termites; then Spike mentioned examples of 
various things miraculously preserved down the centuries - mammoths found in glaciers, the meat on them as fresh as the 
chuck steak from your local Giant; and he wound up by suggesting that if anything was going to be miraculously preserved 
down the centuries thanks to God's almighty will, then wasn't the Ark a pretty good candidate? 
The Reverend Lance Gibson consulted church historians at Baptist universities to establish current thinking on the location 
of the Ark; while Jimmy Fulgood went into probable wind and tide patterns around the time of the Flood. When the two of 
them pooled their findings, they began to favour an area on the south-east side of the mountain a couple of kilometers from the 
summit. Sure, Spike agreed, that's where they'd begin looking, but what about his plan for starting right at the top and 
descending in spider-web circles so that the ground was systematically covered? Jimmy appreciated the thinking behind this 
idea, yet felt he couldn't go along with it from a mountaineering point of view, so Spike bowed to him on that one. Jimmy's 
counter-proposal was that Spike use his connections with NASA and the Navy to get a good set of aerial reconnaissance prints 
of the mountain, then they could blow them up and see if anything Arklike showed. Spike acknowledged this was a logical 
approach but wondered if God had really intended them to take short-cuts. Wasn't the whole vision of the Project as a sort of 

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