| Robert Louis Stevenson | ||||
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Robert
Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) takes us across the sea on adventures in
our own minds. His stories have embedded themselves in the psyche of
Scotland. He draws you into his fiction and leads you from place to
place with all the joy of dicovery he himself must have felt in his
extensive travels. ![]() This panel is designed to do the same. Already alerted by the map in the top right panel the viewer is asked to "take your bearing from the stars". The stars in the panel are arranged in an obviously constructed pattern above the ship. There is a circle of eight stars flanked on each side by two pairs. (See detail on extreme left.) If you look up while youre sitting at the dining table you will see exactly the same pattern above your head in the lights. (See left.) Then, if you "steer by the mast" you will see the three red lights of the kitchen on the mast of the ship. This gives a reading (direction) and if you proceed down the panel you will see that the grass silhouetted in the reflctive surface of the stream spells out 13 steps (in roman numerals). Continue down the panel and you come to the sword with its blade in the ground. On its blade is etched IVR. If, before the pirates of the McCartney family had solved the puzzle, you had taken thirteen steps from the kitchen at the back of the house on a bearing from the ship's mast, then four steps to the right you would have come across a small wooden marker with "X" on it embedded in the ground under a small bush in the garden. After a short dig you would have unearthed a well wrapped copy of Stevenson's "Kidnapped". |
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