White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  Nain Singh’s next mission was to find the famous goldfields of Tibet, which, along with their mystical reputation, had, since earliest times, been one of the major attractions of the place. This continues with twenty-first-century Chinese development and exploitation of not just gold but the plethora of mineral resources to be found in Tibet. Nain Singh penetrated the innermost sanctum of the mines by befriending the wife of the mine boss, tempting her interest with coral which he had brought along to trade (the tea with which he hoped to bribe the boss himself proved insufficiently enticing). Within four days he had all the details of the mining operation, a kind of Tibetan Klondike where any Tibetan was free to have a go – up to 6,000 would travel there in winter, the frozen ground being much safer from cave-ins than in summer, when only 300 miners could be found in the place. Despite this activity, the extent of the mines was regulated. The Tibetans believed, along with most indigenous peoples throughout the world, that there was a cost to violating the Earth; prayer offerings and rituals and restraint on certain mining practices all helped contain the wholesale desecration of the planet’s surface. Plants, previously thought to not feel pain, appear to; perhaps the Earth does as well.

  Montgomerie died at forty-seven, worn out by his spying operations. Before he died, he managed to have Nain Singh awarded the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society – the same medal that all the great explorers of the nineteenth century aspired to earn – and, indeed, he had earned it.

  * Idries Shah

  4

  The Mapping of It

  A good marksman may miss.

  Lepcha proverb

  The deodars were huge, the smell of pine everywhere. Off the road, the going was tough so I went back to the road. I was reading my map and not understanding it; all I knew was that I was some way down the hill from Mussoorie. In a week where I had been co-opted into teaching aikido at a local army base, not unlike the bases I imagined that the pundits were trained in, I had hardly left this small hill town. It was winter and not too busy, but already the egregious development of tourist hotels and villas was apparent. I had discovered my dad’s school was now a hotel – shut – and that George Everest’s house was a ruin. Though it was bitingly cold at night, it was sunny and pleasant enough in the day, so I had gone hill walking with a map from the Lonely Planet guide. And now I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It looked rather accurate on the page, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t lost, exactly, I just didn’t know where I was ‘on the map’.

  Which bring us to maps. Beyond a certain point, the more realistic the map the more useless it is. I remember the shock I had when I first saw aerial photographs of England in colour (this was before Google Earth) and compared them to maps of the same scale: the roads and towns were hardly visible in the photos! All I could see, the overwhelming impression, was green, shades of green from almost black to almost yellow. Maps give the impression that roads and towns rule, that man rules, that the countryside is . . . white. A green lie! But a road map needs to show the roads to be useful. . . and it doesn’t really have to be that accurate, just a bit imaginary.

  I’ve seen what is claimed to be the world’s first map, etched into a rocky nub of limestone in the Egyptian desert. It looks rather like one of Tony Buzan’s mind maps, showing the location of various springs and water mountains carved in the fifth dynasty as the desert dried more and more each year (perhaps a far more challenging climatic change than we are now experiencing). It wasn’t an accurate map – but it was useful.

  Such a map is useful without enthralling us. Such a map lacks scale, accuracy – which are only possible with precise instrumentation. The conquest of time and space begins with a theodolite and a watch. Actually, it begins with a precisely machined baseplate on which degrees of a circle are etched. At the heart of the British lead in map-making lies precision engineering skill.

  The British in India wanted maps that were super accurate. And this all rested on the mystical notion of ‘the spheroid’. I suggest that the slightly insane dedication of the two key Indian map-makers, Lambton and Everest, was due to an apprehension of the cosmic, an appreciation of the mystical, and this found form in an obsession with the spheroid. So what exactly is it?

  Two French expeditions in the 1730s had established that the Earth is flatter at the poles and is a ‘near sphere’ rather than a perfect one. This imperfect sphere is the spheroid; no one knew exactly its size and dimensions until people started making accurate maps. Nor did they really know how much effect gravitational inconsistencies in the Earth’s crust might have on the mapping. It was a shock to map-makers to discover that huge mountains like the Himalayas exerted their own gravitational pull – enough to affect the instruments being used to measure them. To calculate this imperfect sphere as accurately as possible required the mapping of an arc, a section, of the Earth’s surface. The bigger the arc, the more accurately the spheroid could be calculated. These were huge scientific questions, but they were pursued not by men of the Academy, as in the French case, but practical employees of the Great Survey of India. Lambton ‘sold’ the necessity of making as large a measured arc as possible to a lucky old friend, Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, whose elder brother was Governor General of India. He spoke of the advantages of knowing the true width and extent of Indian possessions – he did not need to do much convincing of the need for maps to a military man. He simply insisted that the Great Arc was the only way to go. It wasn’t. But here was a man in the throes of doing science, finding something out that no one knew – just what shape is the Earth exactly?

  You might argue that this was in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the Age of Reason was turning into the Age of Technology. Lambton chose to cast his project in technological and practical terms, not as the abstract pure information of science. It was just a way of ‘selling’ science. But I think that, like Kepler before them, Lambton and later Everest were driven by deeper things. To compute the spheroid – a symbolic ‘O’ – was an act of balance, a sort of communion with the planet, a way to ameliorate the takeover of India by the sword. That they remained only dimly aware of this throughout their great sacrifice is neither here nor there.

  The Great Arc, from Cape Comorin through the middle of India to Mussoorie in the Himalayas, was an attempt, through multiple measurement and cross-reference, to establish the curvature of the Earth under India that most closely corresponded to the geoid, or actual shape of the Earth. The geoid is no use for map-making though, because it is all wobbly. It is the near perfection of the spheroid that makes it useful. Sometimes the spheroid is above the geoid, because of a dip in the Earth’s surface or a flattened section. At other times the spheroid is below the surface – in the Everest region it is about a hundred feet below the geoid. And the geoid here is also some thousands of feet above ‘mean sea level’ – a figure that can be checked at the coast, but as one moves inland it’s necessary to rely on the spheroid to calculate its value. But if the spheroid is too ‘spherical’ then you can get absurd results with an area below ‘mean sea level’ but above actual sea level. You can see how complicated it gets. For this purpose, a bodge is employed, which is called calculating the geoid – the estimated difference between the spheroid and the real Earth’s surface. To calculate this beneath the Himalayan plateau is quite an art, though the good news is that the geoid is never more than a few hundred feet away from the spheroid, the projection needed to make the original calculations of height.

  Lambton and Everest are an example of that not uncommon combination, the starter and the completer-finisher. Everest on his own was probably too conventional to have come up with the extraordinary ambition of the Great Arc. Without Lambton’s example and leadership, say, under another less ambitious soul, he might have plugged away for years doing a conventional, less accurate survey, but without the scientific benefits of increasing knowledge about the planet itself. But Lambton, from an obscure debt-ridden farm in Yorkshire, via a scholarsh
ip in mathematics at grammar school to an ensignship in 1781 in the infantry and thence to surveying, was a true original; a benign, eccentric and utterly obsessional worker for whom the Great Arc was his great idea. But Lambton had neither the health nor staying power to take the project to its logical conclusion: the entire length of India – providing the longest and most accurate spheroidal section ever to be made.

  This multiplication, expansion, quantum enlargement of the project – and, just as importantly, its successful conclusion – was down to George Everest, a former artillery officer and son of a solicitor, for whom appointment to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was his great opportunity for advancement. He was born, appropriately enough, in Greenwich – perhaps meridians were in his blood. His path to India was less tortuous than Lambton’s (the latter had served until he was thirty-nine in America and Canada, losing the sight of one eye during a solar eclipse too closely observed). Everest was in his twenties in 1819 when he started out; he worked until the Arc’s completion in 1843. Shortly before his death in 1823, Lambton wrote:

  It is now upwards of twenty years since I commenced [the survey] on this great scale. These years have been devoted with unremitting zeal to the cause of science, and, if the learned world should be satisfied that I have been successful in promoting its interests THAT will constitute my greatest reward . . . I shall look back with unceasing delight on the years I have passed in India.

  The apparatus used was basic; it was the care lavished over it that made for such accurate results, that and the constant checking and rechecking that Lambton and Everest insisted upon.

  Initially, terracotta lamps were used to sight up upon in the darker hours, but these were dim and limited the distance you could reckon. Everest pioneered the use of massive bonfires – visible for sixty or more miles – which served to home in the telescope of the surveyor up his tower. Then, at a definite time, and at regular sixteen-minute intervals afterwards, a flare would be lit – brilliantly bright, providing a pinpoint location for the fix. The flares were like giant toxic haggis – each one a sheep’s bladder containing: ‘sulphur 136 parts; nitre 544; arsenic 32; indigo 20’. When lit, it needed to burn brightly rather than explode, so it was essential the recipe be followed exactly – and Everest was a stickler for people following his rules. Each flare weighed three pounds – in that way ‘160 will be the load of a camel’.

  If there were convenient hills, then the sighting station and the flare could be situated on the summit. But large parts of India are flat plains, and here Everest had to build special towers and flare masts. A mast would be 21 metres high. The solid core of a tree trunk would be embedded deep in the ground (Lambton had been an expert on this and no doubt passed on his expertise; one of his earliest publications had the surreal title ‘Observations on the Theory of Walls’, which aimed to show that foundations beyond a certain depth are pointless). Attached to the core would be a ring of bamboo poles stretching high into the air. Attached to these would be another set, and then another, until the mast was the required height. The whole thing was then raised and stayed along its entire length, rather like a modern radio antennae mast. A pulley was fixed at the top; this was used to hoist a boom of an extra forty feet at whose end burned the flare; ‘thus supplying’, wrote Everest, ‘a brilliant blue light at upwards of 90 feet above the surface of the ground’.

  Thirty or more miles away the observer stood on a structure quite separate from the theodolite telescope down which he looked at the flare. The solid platform for the monstrously heavy theodolite rested on a tree trunk sunk 1.5 metres into the ground and rising some 10.5 metres. This was stayed all around using ‘antagonising struts’. Around it, but not touching this rigid platform, would be a bamboo scaffold with a ladder attached. Up this, and resting his weight on it, the observer could operate the theodolite without upsetting its precise setting. Naturally, wind and rain and the ague-shaking hand of the surveyor all sought to interfere with the delicate process. To offset this, many, many observations needed to be taken. It was painstaking work indeed.

  As Jorge Luis Borges noted, the suppressed desire of all map-makers is the ultimate accuracy of a 1:1 scale – a map that is as big as its subject. But the map, even on an exact 1:1 scale, is still necessarily an abstraction; a priori it is easier to deal with than life in all its contours and colours. You might argue that the subconscious desire to map India with exactitude is the desire to turn down the volume, reduce the colours, sights and smells to something manageable. Something controllable. As I have mentioned, the Indian Mutiny in 1857 occurred just as the survey reached the zenith of its ambition – the accurate recording of the height of the world’s highest mountain. This seems entirely in keeping with the project. Its overt aims may have been benignly conceived, but the dark side of map-making is control, the subjugation of a nation that had subtly resisted the harassment and bullying first used in the subjugation of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. Ireland was one place, however, in which military surveyors cut their teeth performing similar mapping operations that would later be applied to the far grander scale of the Indian subcontinent.

  Lambton and Everest operated with small teams in remote places. In a nod at the aforementioned task of subjugation, Everest remarked on how overmanned the survey of Ireland was compared to his own incomparably greater task. As we’ve already seen, the British occupation of India is all about being undermanned – a tiny number of Europeans ruling by a kind of sleight of hand. And yet they must rule – and so they reach for their rulers. Everest used a series of six three-metre bars made from brass and iron to compensate for expansion in the heat. This was to provide a six-mile ‘baseline’ of known length from which to calculate further distances and ultimately the spheroid. And what they produced was nothing short of the most accurate possible spheroid model of the Earth’s surface ever attempted.

  The great problem of map-making is knowing where the bottom is. At what point do you start measuring upwards for a mountain like Everest? The spheroid model tells us where the bottom is. Of course, you can make maps without knowing the spheroid. You can fudge the figures and get away with it. But Everest believed in doing a job correctly. And without the Great Arc it would have been impossible to accurately work out the heights of Himalayan mountains, including the mountain that would ultimately take his name.

  The method favoured by George Everest for completing the great survey of India shows a further movement in favour of the mechanical. Just as all sea charts are made using astronomical sightings, so, too, a land survey can be made in this way. But it requires great skill and patience, along with the construction and operation of observatories over several years. By comparison, triangulation is child’s play. But child’s play involving demonic amounts of work. By measuring very accurately a baseline you can then sight up from either end on a triangulation point (a ‘trig’ point). Knowing the two angles needed to converge on this third point allows one to calculate the exact length of the triangle’s sides. This generates two more baselines from which new measurements can be made. Naturally, trig points are sited on high ground if possible – hills and mountains are perfect – though it was only late in the history of the great Indian survey that the giants of the Himalayas could be measured. In the United Kingdom, an excursion to any hill that commands a view of the surrounding lands is usually rewarded with finding a small concrete obelisk about four feet high, ideal for being photographed standing upon in a howling wind, having conquered that particular summit. In the top of the trig point is a scooped-out pattern and a small securing point – this is for stabilising the theodolite needed to sight up the exact angle to the next trig point. For the Great Indian Survey, the theodolite was huge: it weighed 1,042 pounds (the weight of five grown men) and was needed to sight up with pinpoint accuracy on signal markers twenty or more miles away. In this way, India was criss-crossed ‘with bars and chains’ until the map resembled one of those diamond-patterned papers used for drawing cubes on.r />
  ‘Bars and chains’ provides the clue: the Great Survey of India was but a thinly veiled attempt at precise measurement of a territory. In Normandy they still travel the rounds of the parish and beat a boy (symbolically now) so that he will remember the exact dimensions of the communal lands; ‘beating the bounds’ is something known only by name in Britain – but it is the same ritual. Before maps, knowing with exactitude the extent of your own domain was a vitally important part of hanging on to it. In order to get a baseline measure of +/ – 0.028 inches (0.07 centimetres) deviation over a six-mile stretch, Everest’s special measuring rods were used. This resulted in an accuracy of – /+ 12 feet (3.7 metres) in the distance between Delhi and Calcutta, or 125 feet (38 metres) over the entire globe. With the help of converging baselines and astronomical sightings, the measurement could be made tighter and more accurate.

  Everest, unlike his predecessor Lambton, was no respecter of Indian customs. Though he believed that malaria was caused by miasmas rather than demons, he still claimed the populace had ‘minds bowed down under the incubus of superstition’. He collected rocks as he made measurements and believed this work was as valuable as the survey since the specimens would contain the source of the fevers he and his team suffered.

  And suffer they did. Because the monsoon and its immediate aftermath provide periods of exceptional haze-free conditions, it was essential to work during this most inhospitable period. No wonder the locals baulked at being forced into the jungle to take measurements. At one point early on in his career, Everest had to drive men on at gunpoint to get the survey extended. In both the manner of its completion and its conception, the survey teeters close to the obsessive end of insanity. The danger was ‘greater than that encountered on a battlefield [and] the percentage of deaths larger; while the sort of courage . . . required was of a far higher order.’* When a country devotes more effort to mapmaking than making war, you know that map-making is a more profitable business.