The Great Arc Read online

  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.

  If the Great Arc was the star of this production, all India was its set. Outside of the Survey, Everest had few friends and no interests. A break from fieldwork was just an opportunity for catching up on the backlog of computation and correspondence. His ded
ication was as absolute and undisputed as he proclaimed it to be, repeatedly. Yet the unreasonable demands, the histrionic outbursts and the deeply offensive language could not but rankle.

  ‘You are mismanaging sadly,’ he told Henry Keelan, one of his new sub-assistants; ‘when instructed to turn your heliotrope to Bahin, you turned it to Pahera … you might as well turn it to the moon.’ A wilting Keelan proved just as irregular with his night flares. Again he was castigated, but this time he countered by explaining that he did not own a watch. ‘No decent person is ever without a watch,’ thundered Everest. ‘You ought to be ashamed … You might just as well say that you have no coat or no shoes or no hat.’ Still watchless, Keelan continued to get his timings wrong and to drive Everest to despair. ‘You are evidently one of those uncertain persons in whom no sort of confidence ever can be placed. Ask yourself what use a person can be who commits blunders so often … Sometimes you are too lazy to get up in the morning. At other times you make intervals [between flares] of 32 minutes instead of 16. At other times you break the pole. In short you never succeed except by the merest chance.’

  Keelan and another new recruit, Charles Dove (‘where there is a will, there is a way, Mr Dove’), were singled out for particular censure. Both were recalled, Keelan in disgrace, ‘the faint-hearted Dove’ after being struck by a falling mast. More to Everest’s taste were two young Lieutenants who had joined the Survey in 1832. Andrew Scott Waugh and Thomas Renny-Tailyour had received some training with the Irish Survey. They were promising mathematicians and ‘tasty draughtsmen’. Best of all, they were officers and gentlemen, descendants of landed Scots gentry and recipients of a good education. Everest had never approved of Lambton’s ‘mestizos’, and after an uneasy induction with, but not under, William Rossenrode, each of the Lieutenants was promoted above Rossenrode as full assistant, rather than sub-assistant. They were then given command of one of the meridional series running north from Olliver’s Calcutta Longitudinal Series. But as men like Keelan and Dove fell by the wayside, Waugh and Renny would be increasingly summoned to the Great Arc and would perform much of the final triangulation.

  With the preliminary triangulation approaching the ancient capital of Delhi, it was Rossenrode who suffered another tumble from grace. The city’s most obvious natural feature was The Ridge. It flanks Old Delhi on the north-west and would become hallowed ground for the British when, twenty-three years later, they there staged a do-or-die struggle against the forces of Indian resurgence in what they called the Indian Mutiny.

  Rossenrode had been sent to find a suitable site on The Ridge to serve as the next station. He soon discovered that, then as now, Delhi’s atmosphere was amongst the most polluted in the world. Thirty miles away, Everest, although he himself could make out very little, seemed to imagine that Rossenrode, in the midst of the haze, had only to pick out his signals and settle on a site. Why was he taking so long? If he could not see the signals, he had only to shift his position. ‘You are wearing me to fiddlestrings about this Delhi ray … If you do not take some pains, you will never succeed and I may be detained here for the next six years. It is pleasant enough for you, I dare say, near a grand cozy city, but for me and all about me it is a great nuisance, I assure you.’

  Like Keelan and Dove, Rossenrode was recalled. Immediately, as if by design, the fog cleared enough for the signals to be seen. Crowing over this disgrace of one of his senior sub-assistants, Everest hastened into town. There he quickly discovered that the sightings were worthless and that the buildings on The Ridge were mostly too unstable to serve as a station. He lit upon an old mosque but eventually adopted a domed building which looks to have been that originally chosen by Rossenrode. Known as the shrine of ‘Pir Ghalib’ or ‘Pir Ghyb’, it would later surface in guidebooks as an ‘ancient observatory’. Twentieth-century visitors, oblivious of the Great Arc and all that it involved, had evidently identified as pre-British both the hole drilled by the Survey in the dome and the corresponding hole and marker directly beneath it in the floor of the building. This was the standard method of ensuring that the instrument on the roof was precisely plumbed above the marker. It would be replicated in the custom-built towers whose design Everest already had on the drawing board.

  A month later and now within sight of the mountains, Everest turned on his most senior sub-assistant. Joseph Olliver, one of Lambton’s Madras protégés, had been with the Survey for nearly thirty years. He had accompanied Everest in the jungles of Hyderabad, commanded the Calcutta Series, and had become Everest’s most consistently successful triangulator. He had also, like Rossenrode, been followed into the Survey’s employ by three of his sons. Described as being ‘of a retiring disposition’ – and certainly an uncomplaining one – he had now served as Everest’s foil for a decade and a half. He deserved better than the outburst which followed an unsuccessful night of flare-burning.

  I dare not put a blue light into the hands of any of you. You seem to think they grow like grass, and that all you have to do is put them at the top of the pole and set fire to them, just as you would to a whisp of grass. I suppose the only way is for me to … leave you to recover your senses, for it seems that you will not abide by my orders, but – pell-mell, helter-skelter, foul or fair – away go to damnation and destruction the only means we have of getting through our work.

  You all seem to me to be right stark staring mad. Never was a worse evening … I could not see five miles in any direction. The sun was obscured at 4 o’clock, and by 5 there was not a vestige of him, and that is the kind of atmosphere in which you choose to burn blue lights. I have superseded Mr Dove … I have sent out Mr Keelan … and unless I receive some assurance that you will not play the fool in the like manner again, I shall certainly adopt equally strong measures to you.

  An unamused Olliver no doubt shuffled away into his retiring disposition.

  As the cool dry season gave way to the hot blasts of April, the preliminary triangulation was carried up into the dusty Siwaliks. Hoisting the Arc over these outermost sierras and down into the Dun entailed finding two intervisible stations on the crest of the range. It should have been easy. But following weeks of no hills, now there were too many. Amidst reports of Everest’s men fleeing from tigers and being chased by rogue elephants, six positions were in turn occupied and abandoned. Nor were the seventh and eighth ideal. In a blatant example of surveyors manipulating the geography they were so intent on measuring, intervisibility was secured by reducing the height of an intervening peak. With crowbars and sledgehammers, twenty feet of rock were pruned from the profile of the Siwaliks.

  Everest was in no mood to be troubled by scruple. Cooler climes and clearer vistas beckoned. Hathipaon was now visible across the Dun; respectable peaks, like The Chur, loomed invitingly beyond; and along the furthest horizon marched the serried snow-caps of the Great Himalaya. With the end in sight, he penned a triumphant report in which he announced that there was ‘no instance on record of a symmetrical series of triangles having been carried over a country similarly circumstanced’. Every station for the final triangulation had been selected, the required height for every tower ascertained, and at least two angles of every triangle approximately measured. It was, in short, ‘an unbounded success’. And for it Everest, as usual, took unbounded credit.

  Fourteen towers would be needed for the final triangulation, at a cost of about two thousand rupees apiece. Basically each was a very solid rectangular version, in brick or stone, of the mast and scaffolding used for the preliminary observations. Again the instrument table was mounted on a pillar isolated from the observation platform. The table was centred over a shaft down which the plumb-line could pass to the marker stone in the ground below, and the platform was always on the roof of the topmost storey beneath a canvas awning. Heights varied from forty to sixty feet, and so did the architecture. To judge from those which survive, the most popular model owed something to the bell-towers of Tuscany.

  Access was by ladder up the outside. Offic
ers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey were not accustomed to such luxuries as stairs, says Everest. To haul to the top the half-ton Great Theodolite, now rebuilt and about to re-enter service, a crane was mounted on the topmost platform. Unfortunately it was found to restrict visibility. A lesser derrick had to be constructed to dismantle the crane, the derrick being of a size to be then manhandled to the ground.

  The building work was to be undertaken by different engineers attached to the various British military establishments along the line of the Arc. Plans were sent to them, detailed instructions given, and a lively correspondence was generated. But it would be two years before they were completed. Meanwhile the Arc’s conclusion could be anticipated by measuring the final base-line, selecting terminal stations in the Himalayas, and preparing for the delicious certainties of the final computations. That, after thirty years, the longest and most ambitious meridional arc in the world would be successfully completed was no longer in doubt. Whether Everest would be there to claim the unbounded credit for it was a different matter.

  TEN

  Et in Arcadia

  Slumped on the grass outside Hathipaon, watching the mist scud over the ridge, I had got to thinking about the extraordinary irony of it all. How had something as rigorous and predictable as the Great Arc had such unforeseen consequences? It was as if scientific endeavour were subject to a law of karma which ordained that every experiment must be productive of its antithesis. Thus a sweat-soaked odyssey conducted across the burning plains of India would uncover the frozen secrets of the highest Himalayas; a measurement intended to discover the curvature of the globe would reveal its greatest irregularity; and a man who dealt in decimals to the sixth place and degrees to a hundredth of a second would find his name attached to the most colossal of mountains.