The Great Arc (16 page)

For the most part, all that tedious work with flares and masts had paid off. Taking his angles in the early hours of the morning when refraction was at its greatest, Everest had little difficulty in sighting from one station to the next. The only setback came at the tower of Dateri, just east of Delhi, whence the sight-line to the next station on a ruined mosque at Bulandshahar proved to be blocked despite extensive tree-felling. It seemed, in fact, to be twice interrupted, once by a village called Ramnagar and then again by ‘the lofty houses of the large town of Bhataona’. This was precisely the problem which all the preliminary triangulation had been designed to eliminate. There was now nothing for it but ‘to cut a gap 30 feet wide’ straight through both the village and downtown Bhataona.

To Rossenrode fell the unenviable task of placating the townsfolk and assessing the compensation to which the evicted would be entitled. ‘How Mr Rossenrode has contrived to effect this severe operation … surprizes me,’ wrote Everest. The people were Jats, agriculturalists with a reputation for extreme
belligerence whom even well-wishers invariably described as ‘sturdy’. It was, moreover, mid-winter. Being put out of one’s house meant braving a heavy frost and bone-chilling fogs. Yet Rossenrode, venturing forth on his task unarmed and unsupported, somehow carried the day. In Ramnagar ‘5 huts, thatched, were crushed by the fall of the trees,’ while in Bhataona ‘37 flat-roofed houses and 52 huts of mud [were] razed to the ground.’ The hardship, as also the expense, was, in Everest’s word, ‘disastrous’. ‘I hope,’ he added, ‘it will never again fall to my lot to have so disagreeable a task to discharge.’

South of Agra it was as if the populace had taken their revenge. Operating here not from towers but from the hill sites selected four years earlier, Everest found that many of his markers had been deliberately removed. It was further evidence of what he always called ‘the suspicious native mind’. Like Lambton, he had already fallen foul of protective princelings anxious about the privacy of their womenfolk. In fact he could quite understand their concerns. An instrument which could turn women upside down (‘an indecent posture, no doubt, and very shocking to contemplate’) might also be able to see through things. It was, therefore, ‘natural enough that they should assign to us the propensity of sitting all day long, spying through stone walls at those they deem so enchanting’. Likewise he was rather touched by the reverence sometimes extended to his instruments. The Great Theodolite attracted particular attention and, in backward areas like the rugged ravine country which he now encountered along the Chambal river, the instrument was much fêted by childless brides and other credulous supplicants. But he had no sympathy at all with those who, for much more understandable reasons, removed his markers.

The trouble seems to have stemmed from the mutual incomprehension which had come to characterise British – Indian relations. According to Colonel William Sleeman, a contemporary
of Everest who was then famously engaged in suppressing the criminal caste known as ‘Thugs’, the Survey was causing deep rural anxieties. In particular its nocturnal habits and its predilection for hilltops, which were often the abode of a local deity, were deemed highly suspicious.

Needless to say, the choleric Everest was not the man to allay such superstitions, and nor, according to Sleeman, were the local Brahmins: ‘The priests encouraged the peasantry to believe that men who required to do their work by the aid of fires in the dead of night on high places … must be holding communion with supernatural beings which might be displeasing to the Deity.’ What more natural, then, than that pious locals should quickly exorcise the affront by digging up the embedded stone left by these unwanted sorcerers, or at least erasing the mystical mark which they had gouged in its surface.

Such wilful sabotage entailed the Survey in additional observations to relocate the original site, and then more laborious sinking of markers. The delays meant that it was impossible to complete the primary triangulation during the 1835–6 season. When the work was resumed in 1836–7, Everest compounded the delay by picking a quarrel with the authorities of the important state of Gwalior, through which the Arc passed between Agra and Sironj. Princely states in India, although not administered by the British, were invariably lumbered with a British Resident who acted as advisor and liaison officer to the state government, or
durbar.
The Resident in Gwalior, an exalted being in the coveted Political Department of British India, had a high regard for Gwalior’s Maharajah, and had experienced some difficulty in convincing him that the Great Trigonometrical Survey should be made welcome in his territories. Everest thought he knew why. The Resident was incompetent; witness one of his letters to the Maharajah which referred to himself as ‘one Major Everest engaged in measuring’. It was as bad as being called a ‘compass-wallah’. Indeed it was ‘the
first instance of rudeness and opposition which I have experienced on the part of a British functionary’.

The Resident had since explained that, writing in Persian (the diplomatic language of India), he had been unable to find terms which could do justice to a title like ‘Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey and Surveyor-General’. Everest remained incensed. He dashed off an official letter of remonstrance to Calcutta, he made the cardinal mistake of short-circuiting the Resident by appealing direct to the
durbar
, and he then found further cause for complaint when the promised escort of Gwalior troopers did not meet him on the state’s frontier. For two weeks of the precious surveying season, the entire Great Trigonometrical Survey, about one thousand strong, languished on the Gwalior frontier while Everest waged his pointless vendetta. Since he was already provided with his own escort, the Gwalior troops were no more essential than had been the Hyderabad troops with whom he had come to blows nineteen years earlier in his first season with the Survey. But this time the outcome was different. When the Gwalior escort did eventually materialise, it was not they who were chastised but Everest. In no uncertain terms the government reprimanded him for assuming diplomatic status, wasting valuable time (its as well as his), and insulting one of its senior dignitaries.

Under something of a cloud, therefore, in 1837 the primary triangulation was at last carried south to Sironj. It was not a place which Everest recalled with affection. Back in 1824–5, the supposed insubordination of Olliver, the ‘uncouth’ language of Rossenrode, and the volubility of Rossenrode’s horse had here driven him to the brink of insanity. Nor did he now have reason to revise his opinion of the place; for what should have been a major triumph with the completion of the Great Arc from one end of India to the other was marred by a fatal revelation. The base-line at Sironj as calculated by the triangulation carried down from the base in the Dun was found
to differ markedly from that obtained by actual measurement over the ground in 1824–5. A couple of inches would not have mattered, but it was a case of a wholly unacceptable three feet. Something had gone badly wrong.

Everest’s suspicions immediately focused on Dinwiddie’s chain, the one used throughout by Lambton and the one on which he himself had relied for the Sironj measurement. If the error lay in the Sironj base, it could be discovered by remeasuring the base with the new compensation bars. But the bars were in store at Hathipaon. Trundling them the 450 miles down to Sironj would have to wait until after the 1837 monsoon.

Meanwhile an attempt was made to set up the two ‘Astronomical Circles’. These instruments, specially made while Everest was in England, dwarfed even the Great Theodolite and were to be used for the final astronomical observations to establish the latitude and longitude of the Arc’s extremities. But the test-run proved to be another dismal failure. When erected, the Circles were found to be insufficiently stable and had to be carted back to the Hathipaon workshops for modification.

By December 1837 the Survey and the compensation bars had made the forty-day trek back down to Sironj. Remeasurement of the base-line began immediately, but under Waugh’s direction rather than Everest’s. The Major’s worst fears were being realised. Another catalogue of grisly symptoms had again confined him to his tent and its adjacent ‘Necessary’. ‘Dreadful rheumatic pains in my bones – fever – loss of appetite – indigestion – intestines totally deranged – stomach totally powerless – my strength entirely gone – the whole system apparently destroyed and for ever undermined.’ He languished in his tent, not so much a caged lion as a cowed one. In marked contrast to the earlier measurement at Sironj, he declared himself hopeful, indeed touchingly confident, of his subordinates’ abilities to conduct the operation on their own. In fact they were ‘so
thoroughly masters, each of his own part, that the measurement … proceeded just as satisfactorily as if I had been personally superintending it’. This was not the Everest of old. Weathered by age, achievement and ill-health, the Major was mellowing.

The compensation bars in due course produced a measurement for the seven and a quarter miles which differed from that obtained with Dinwiddie’s chain by 2.79 feet. Thus the entire discrepancy, save for 6.395 inches, was accounted for. Everest would join in the general delight: ‘considering that the Sironj and Dehra Dun bases are separated by nearly 450 miles and 86 principal triangles, [it] is as gratifying a proof of the accuracy of the series as could be desired.’

But to what extent he appreciated this triumph at the time is uncertain. Physically he was indeed recovering, but mentally Sironj was again taking its toll. To his ‘indescribable dismay’ he now found that not only was his eyesight affected but that his memory ‘was in a great measure gone’. He was oppressed by ‘a dreadful foreboding of ill’. It haunted his sleep and during waking hours took the form of ‘some spectre or monster of the fancy coming to hold converse with me’. ‘I thought it would certainly have ended in madness. Indeed I have little doubt that it would have … if I had not come to a better climate and foresworn business to a great extent.’

The better climate was that of Hathipaon and the Dun. Everest’s days in the field were almost over. While he concentrated increasingly on supervising the astronomical operations and computing the results, the final observations for the Great Arc would be made by his sorely tried but now genuinely trusted assistants under Waugh as Assistant Superintendent.

The remaining tasks included the vertical triangulation of the entire series from Sironj to the Dun to establish the heights of all the stations and so of the Dun base-line, an important first step for the triangulation of the Himalayan peaks. Simultaneously re-observation of the triangles south from Sironj to
Hyderabad was undertaken and plans were laid to remeasure the Bidar base-line. To this end the compensation bars had been left in store at Sironj, suitably greased against corrosion with pig-fat and goose-lard and under the watchful eye of 2nd Assistant Owen Mulheran.

That Everest had not exaggerated his mental state may be inferred from the fate of the unfortunate Mulheran. After a few solitary weeks in Sironj, he was reportedly overcome by a fit of religious mania ‘under which he successively burned off all his toes and several of his fingers in the slow fire of a candle’. Other manifestations of derangement ‘of a similar and even more lamentable nature’ included some wanton scratching of the precious bars. Fortunately they were not irrevocably damaged, and in 1841 were indeed employed to remeasure the Bidar base and thus complete remeasurement of the Arc to the same exacting standard all the way to Hyderabad, about nine hundred miles from the Dun. As for Mulheran, he too was not irrevocably discredited, although never entirely trusted. Four years later a colleague would draw attention to his curious habit of ‘coming to office immediately after the internal and external application of a quantity of brandy and salt’.

The remeasurement of the Arc south to Bidar in Hyderabad had been undertaken to correct errors which might have resulted from the use of Dinwiddie’s now disgraced chain and other inferior instruments. If Everest had had his way, the entire Arc would have been revised right down to Cape Comorin. But the government had only reluctantly approved the remeasurement of the Bidar base and could see no reason for further revision in the name of inch-perfect geodesy. Lambton’s work was still good enough for all practical purposes.

There was even stronger resistance to Everest’s unexpected suggestion of extending the Arc northwards. Following observations on The Chur and other nearby peaks, he had formed
an ambitious plan of ‘turning the flank of the mountains’ by carrying the Arc up into western Tibet and on into Russian territory. The Chinese, who pretended to sovereignty over Tibet, would have to be persuaded to co-operate; but Everest thought that if both the Russians and the British could ‘act combinedly’, Peking’s jealousy might be ‘counteracted’. ‘An arc of the meridian extending from Cape Comorin to the northern extremity of the Russian dominions near Nova Zem-bla!’ he gasped. ‘It is a vast project certainly! Utilitarians will scoff at the bare idea and say
cui bono?
[‘to what good?’] Let these gentlemen prove to me the use of any earthly thing, and then I will take in hand to demonstrate the point at issue.’

The point at issue was, of course, the shape of the world. To Everest as to Lambton, discovering the precise figure of the earth was the most basic challenge in human science. It was a far greater ‘desideratum’ than, say, locating the source of the Nile or understanding the properties of electricity. Or, indeed, discovering the world’s highest mountain. The Arc, quite apart from its cartographical, navigational and geological implications, promised the most intimate knowledge of the earth’s dimensions; and if knowledge was the prerequisite of mastery, on it rested the future progress of man’s management of his planet.