The Great Arc (14 page)

But for ‘A
2
’, neither Herbert nor Webb had proposed a name. Observing it from a distance of about fifty miles, they had been unable to ascertain whether there was already a local name for it. Moreover, they probably felt disinclined to suggest one. For were it to remain the world’s highest, this honour would almost certainly be contested by their superiors.

Such anxieties, however, proved groundless. In the course of time it emerged that it did indeed have a local name – Nanda Devi – and that it was not the world’s highest. But Nanda Devi is, still, the highest mountain in India (as opposed
to Nepal, Tibet and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir); and at 25,645 feet its official height today is only a hundred feet less than that given by Herbert.

T
he outermost limit of the Himalayas in Garhwal is defined by the Siwalik hills, a brown sierra of modest height which intervenes between Mussoorie’s alpine slopes and the baking Indian plains. Here, on the morning of 12 November 1833, a small army might have been seen breasting the ridge and, with the dew still on their boots, slithering down parched and gravel-strewn gullies, past Saharanpur whence Hodgson had begun his Garhwal survey, and on into the dusty immensity of the Gangetic plain. After an interlude of eight years, George Everest was taking the field again; and with its Superintendent back at the helm, the Great Trigonometrical Survey was launching itself into the dreaded haze of Hindustan. Departing Hathipaon with two assistants, three sub-assistants, four elephants, forty-two camels, thirty horses and ‘about 700 natives’ – in that order – Everest was about to address what he considered the most difficult terrain ever to be triangulated, let alone trigonometrically surveyed to the exacting standards of the Great Arc.

During the previous season he had done little more than assess the challenge. From his well publicised base-line measurement in Calcutta, he had journeyed west to Sironj, where the Arc had been abandoned seven years previously, and had then reconnoitred north through Gwalior, Agra and Delhi along the line which it now must follow. On the way, he had met up with Olliver, Rossenrode and some of the newly recruited assistants. All were already marching and counter-marching in search of
hills, mounds, barrows, buildings, anything with a view which might serve as a trig station. But the season was exceptionally dry, the atmosphere a ‘pea soup’, and the heat soon became like nothing Everest had ever experienced. One of his parties was shot at, another robbed. All reported numerous fever cases.

Rossenrode, currently rated the most reliable of veterans, had managed well in the more undulating country south of Agra; but the dependable Olliver had let Everest down on the section thence to Mathura (Muttra); and a man called Boileau, lately transferred from topographical surveying, had been an unmitigated disaster wherever he was deployed. Everest had hoped to complete the selection of stations by May 1833. In fact it had barely begun.

Continuing north, he had found that whereas up to Delhi he might get away with building towers on only one side of the Arc, from there onwards every station would require a tower. According to the co-ordinates worked out for places in the plains by Herbert and Webb using their peaks as ‘fixes’, the 78-degree meridian passed straight up the ‘two rivers’ region between the Jumna and the Ganges. Known in Hindi as the Doab, this was a congested flat even by the horizon-choked standards of the Hindustan plain. Up to Delhi, the Arc could advance with one ‘foot’ on rising ground to the west of the Jumna. Thereafter it would have to cross to the eastern bank and plunge both ‘feet’ into a cloudy murk whose floor was strewn with villages and encumbered with trees.

Fuming over the season having been such an abject failure, Everest had then retired for the monsoon to his new property in the hills. It was his first visit to Hathipaon. There were leaks to be fixed, workshops to be built and accommodation to be organised. As the monsoon battered the ridge, Everest’s spirits revived. In a make-or-break gesture, he vowed to take the field personally at the head of his entire establishment as soon as the rains were over. Hence the cavalcade which crossed the Siwaliks in November 1833.

They headed straight for Mathura, halfway between Delhi and Agra. There and elsewhere Everest had left instructions for the stockpiling of timber, bamboo poles, ropes, blocks and pulleys. These items were now divided up into numerous cart, camel and elephant loads and despatched to depots along the line of the Arc.

Triangulating such impossible terrain involved different procedures to those followed by Lambton when
droog
-hopping across Mysore or by Everest himself when working up through central India. A simple linear progression in which an advance party chose the best hills while the Superintendent, following along behind with the Great Theodolite, took the angles, was out of the question. ‘I was about to make my first essay in a new career,’ wrote Everest, ‘wherein all my former experience would avail me but little.’

Except where some existing eminence invited attention, stations in the plains could be located almost anywhere. The skill lay in finding the least objectionable position, somewhere sufficiently distant from, and at an appropriate angle to, other stations whose lights might eventually be sighted through the dense atmosphere after a minimum in the way of tree-felling, house-demolition and ground-levelling. But just how much clearance would be necessary depended on where the sight-line would actually fall. Would lopping a single branch solve the problem? Or would a whole village have to be moved? With sight-lines grazing the ground for up to thirty miles, it was hard to tell.

It was therefore essential to predetermine the direction of each line mathematically. A chain of small triangles conducted between the two positions could provide this information, but the procedure was time-consuming and often abortive. Better was the system developed by Everest which he called ‘ray-tracing’. For this a party advanced along the supposed line with a perambulator and compass, traversing to left or right at exactly ninety degrees in order to work round any obstructions,
and likewise in order to home in on the final position. From the angle followed, the traverses involved and the distances recorded, the true bearing of the sight object could be calculated. Telescopes and heliotropes could then be trained accordingly and the ‘ray’ duly cleared of obstructions. It was an extremely trying business. Yet the cost of a mistake, like erecting a tower where it would not serve its purpose, was unthinkable.

To avoid such a catastrophe, stations were also tested by a series of preliminary experimental or ‘approximate’ triangulations made from temporary structures. This work could be going ahead on different sections of the Arc simultaneously. Likewise, once the preliminary triangulation was completed, base-lines and astronomical operations could be undertaken while the masonry towers were being built for the final triangulation. The whole four-hundred-mile sector of the Arc north of Sironj was thus treated as one, and progress was measured not in miles advanced but in operations completed.

The selection of stations and their preliminary triangulation having largely failed in the previous season, their completion was the main task during the dry weather of 1833–4. Leaving others to finalise Rossenrode’s work up from Sironj, Everest commenced operations at Fatehpur Sikri, thirty miles from Agra. This was on the easier section south of Delhi, and Fatehpur Sikri actually stood on a low hill. It was here in the 1570s that the Mughal Emperor Akbar had re-sited his capital. More a palatial set than a city, Fatehpur Sikri’s pristine halls and courtyards, all in the same dull red sandstone, had quickly palled on the Emperor. He abandoned the place in the 1580s and, after subduing most of India, was eventually buried beneath another noble pile of sandstone on the outskirts of nearby Agra.

To the flat and domeless rooftop of this latter mausoleum Everest now ordered one of his signal teams preparatory to reconnecting the dead city of Fatehpur Sikri with its dead
emperor at Agra. The tomb had been damaged by British military operations in 1803 and was presumably reckoned less sacrosanct than that of Akbar’s grandson, Shah Jehan, whose Taj Mahal in the heart of Agra was also well within Everest’s range of vision. As with other notable landmarks, the position of the Taj was duly observed and for the first time precisely recorded. But tempting though it may have been, Everest refrained from scaling its great white dome. Mercifully, that moist ‘tear on the face of eternity’, as Rabindranath Tagore would call it, never suffered the indignity of being dabbed at by a Survey flag.

On Akbar’s tomb the task of raising and roping the twenty-two-foot flagstaff fell to the much-maligned Captain Alexander Boileau. Boileau had been making the most of his stay in Agra. The city’s Executive Engineer happened to be his brother, so there had been no problem about obtaining authority to remove a pillar from one of the tomb’s crowning cupolas when it interfered with his sight-line. Between such acts of casual vandalism, he had also taken the opportunity to propose to Charlotte, the sister of his brother’s wife. When Everest moved on, the pair would hastily marry before Boileau himself was shunted north up the Arc.

Over at Fatehpur Sikri, a platform had been prepared and a stone marker to record the point of observation had been sunk deep in the ground. Everest was expected any day. ‘The evening of my arrival I shall light two large [bon]fires, for which please keep a look-out,’ he wrote to Boileau. ‘I wish you to burn a dozen blue lights at intervals of a quarter of an hour … If you see the double fires, allow half an hour to expire after their first blaze before you burn your first blue light … If you can lay down the approximate position of [Akbar’s tomb] it will assist me … I remain your most obedient servant, George Everest.’

Convention alone dictated the closing sentence; Everest was no one’s obedient servant, least of all Boileau’s. The system
of bonfires and the use of flares, rather than terracotta lamps, was also now standard. By following Everest’s instructions carefully, the flares – like large fireworks except that each was sealed into a sheep’s bladder – could be made up locally. The recipe involved 739 parts (‘sulphur 136 parts; nitre 544; arsenic 32; indigo 20’, etc., etc.), and was not susceptible to improvisation. Any adulteration and the flare would not light, any variation and it might explode; and much as Everest enjoyed a shower of falling stars, they were ‘extremely inconvenient for observation’. Finally, each flare should weigh three pounds, so that ‘160 will be the load for a camel’.

Needless to say, Boileau’s flares performed dismally. They deluged his men with lava and spluttered sparks to useless effect. A month later the wretched Boileau was reported absent without leave. Perhaps he was on honeymoon. But as Everest noted with unconscious irony, ‘it is not the first time.’ Boileau was discharged.

Everest continued north. As the country levelled out, new sighting devices were tried. Flagstaffs gradually gave way to masts (as objects to observe), and platforms to scaffolds (as the places whence to observe them). A mast was typically seventy feet high and consisted of a core post, as long as possible and deeply embedded in the ground, around the top of which long bamboo poles were firmly lashed. The upper extremities of these poles being far higher than the post, they were themselves tied so as to form a trunk. Another section consisting of more poles was then lashed round it – and so on, like a giant fishing-rod but with the whole thing being as liberally secured with stays and guys as a telecom mast.

At the very top was fixed a pulley by which a single bamboo pole of some forty feet could be hauled up in a horizontal position. This was in effect a boom, to one end of which the flare could be attached while from the other end dangled a long rope. When the flare was lit, the boom would be smartly hoisted to the top of the mast by the pulley, and then
manoeuvred into the vertical by pulling on the dangling rope, ‘thus supplying,’ according to a triumphant Everest, ‘a brilliant blue light at upwards of 90 feet above the surface of the ground’.

Meanwhile many miles away the observer, usually Everest himself, was anxiously peering down the telescope of his theodolite from a platform at the top of a more substantial structure. The theodolite itself stood on its stand, which was mounted on a circular table bolted to the top of a thirty-five-foot spar of seasoned timber. At least five feet of this veritable tree-trunk were buried in the ground, and at twenty feet up, an iron collar afforded attachments for stout stays and ‘antagonising struts’. The idea was that the structure, and so the instrument, would be totally rigid and impervious to vibration. That meant that the observer had somehow to reach it and operate it from a separate structure. A scaffolding with ladders and a tented observation platform was constructed around the mast but completely independent of it.

Such, at least, was the theory, although in practice it was often found that because of the wind, the mast did indeed move. More bamboos were then introduced to lash it to the posts of the scaffolding, thereby rather compromising the principle and obliging everyone to tiptoe shoeless up the ladders. While observations were actually in progress, no one was permitted to so much as move on the scaffolding. Only Everest and someone to hold the lamp by which he took the readings could stand. The rest – the assistant with the angle-book, the lampman with the oil, the instrument attendant with his duster – had to squat on the floor and stir not a muscle.

Supposing the theodolite to be a camera, the scene must have resembled that of a night shoot on a movie set. In the ingenious use of bamboo scaffolding the Bombay film industry probably surpasses the Survey; but in the hush of expectation as Everest climbed to his platform and ‘stood to the instrument’, in the cry of ‘Lights!’ and in the endless retakes, any
movie-maker would have felt at home. Save for a canvas chair and a plastic eyeshade, Everest could have been an eminent director. His role was that of orchestrating a vast production in which his various ‘crews’ were expected to heed his every command without necessarily comprehending his vision. To one who saw beauty in every angle and truth in every equation, scientific probity was tantamount to artistic integrity. As the mastermind behind the whole enterprise, Everest felt entitled to a deference which transcended rank and bordered on reverence. Creative genius was at work; an enormous expenditure had to be justified, a perfectionist’s reputation upheld, and a monumental ego sustained.