Olliver eventually reached the hill and hoisted the flag; but his news was not good. Most of the previous signalmen had succumbed to fever; some were near death. Should the whole survey party proceed to Yellapuram (the village after which the new site was named) the risks would be immense. Everest was unimpressed. Desperate to complete his assignment and so win the approval of Colonel Lambton, he reckoned that all risks were warranted.
The trail from Panch Pandol to Yellapuram wound through ‘the wildest and thickest forest that I had ever invaded’. It took three days; but at least the weather stayed fine and the vegetation was at its most spectacular after the recent rains. Voysey and Everest rejoiced as they rode, then quipped as they climbed. At last the canopy thinned and, seeing again the sky and the summit, both men spontaneously roared a favourite Shakespearian couplet:
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain’s top.
Everest, however, misquoted; and neither man seems to have been aware of Romeo’s next and more cautionary line: ‘I must be gone and live, or stay and die.’
After they dismounted at Yellapuram, the oppressive silence of the jungle brought to Everest’s mind a wilderness scene from the Arabian Nights. There was a spectacular view up the Godavari and, beside and beyond it, three excellent heights from which to complete his survey. Congratulating himself that ‘the end of my toilsome and laborious task seemed now to be within my grasp’, he immediately sent out flag parties.
But no sooner had jocund day forsaken the misty mountain’s top than fever struck. That evening Everest went down with what he called a violent typhus, the result of ‘my day’s ride through a powerful sun and over a soil teeming with vapour and malaria’. Dr Voysey succumbed soon after. Within five days most of their followers, including escort, signalmen, porters, mahouts and runners, nearly 150 in all, were also prostrated.
It seemed indeed as if at last the genius of the jungle had risen in his wrath to chastise the hardihood of those men who had dared to violate the sanctity of his chosen haunt. All hope of completing the work this season being now at an end, it remained only to proceed with as much expedition as possible towards Hyderabad … [and] to return, baffled and crippled, through an uninterrupted distance of nearly two hundred miles.
Dr Voysey took to his palanquin. Everest, lacking such a conveyance, had a stretcher made. For porters they looked not to their prostrate followers but to the retinue of ‘a rebellious chief who aided my progress most manfully’. It took three weeks for them to reach Hyderabad, throughout which time ‘the jungle fever pursued my party like a nest of irritated bees’.
When news of the disaster reached the city, all available carts, palanquins, elephants and camels were commandeered and sent out to bring home the sick. Most were indeed retrieved but, out of the total of 150, fifteen had died on the road and not one had escaped unscathed. The survivors, wrote a shaken Everest, ‘bore little resemblance to human beings, but seemed like a crowd of corpses recently torn from the grave’.
So ended Lieutenant George Everest’s first season in the employ of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. A long convalescence was necessary; it was anyway October, by which month the visibility had lost its champagne clarity. For Everest the experience had been an eye-opener. He recalled it with a mixture of horror and naivety which is seldom found in his other writings. It was not exceptional; greater catastrophes would overtake the Survey and many more lives would be lost. But it was a testing induction for a novice, and it was an ominous overture to an illustrious but controversial career.
Dr Voysey would never fully recover. Though he soldiered on, he would die four years later from a recurrence of the Yellapuram malaria. Everest, too, would never regain what he calls ‘the full vigour of youth’. In the following year he returned to Yellapuram to complete his observations but again succumbed to a ‘violent attack of jungle fever’. The work was in fact completed by his dependable assistant Joseph Olliver. Meanwhile Everest, ‘deeming it unwise to sacrifice myself for an unimportant object’, took a year’s sick leave and sailed to the Cape of Good Hope to convalesce. He would return to duty in 1822 but within a year was racked by fevers both old and new. Gruesome complications ensued which would temporarily reduce him to a cripple. In 1825, aged thirty-five, he would again sail away on sick leave, this time to England. He would not return to India for five years.
Critical for Everest, the period from 1820 to 1830 would prove even more critical for what he proclaimed to officials in London to be ‘the greatest scientific undertaking of the kind that has ever been attempted’. By this he meant not the ambitious map-making programme of the Survey of India, nor even the rigorous methods of its Great Trigonometrical Survey, but the latter’s supreme expression, the Great Indian Arc of the Meridian.
As his birthplace of Greenwich was to meridians, so George Everest would become to the Arc. The two became inseparable. The Arc would be his life’s work, his dearest attachment, his near-fatal indulgence; and while he lived, his name would be synonymous with it. Yet it was not his brain-child, nor in large part his achievement – those honours belong to the less articulate genius of William Lambton. Nor, when Everest died, would he long be remembered for the Arc. Instead, his name was purloined for a peak.
It was not in his nature to decline the lasting fame of having his name ‘placed a little nearer the stars than that of any other’. Even the controversy which the naming of Mount Everest would prompt is in character. On the other hand, his truculent spirit must surely be turning in its grave at being remembered only for the mountain and not for the measurement. Other than as convenient trig stations, mountains barely featured in his life. He saw the Himalayas only towards the end of his career and he hailed them then only as a fitting conclusion to the Great Arc. There is nothing to suggest that he was particularly curious as to their height.
Yet there was a connection between the Arc and the Himalayas, and there was a logic in naming the earth’s greatest protuberance for Everest. For the Great Arc would solve the mystery of the mountains. The painstaking measurement of a meridian up through India’s burning immensity would make possible the measurement of the ice-capped Himalayas. This is the story of both, of the Arc and of the mountains.
Everest’s predecessor as Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey is less obviously commemorated. In fact, to this mild and reclusive man of science there seems to be no memorial at all. There is not even any structure which can certainly be associated with his work. It has, though, been my privilege to stand at his graveside. The place proved hard to find and was not at all distinguished. I doubt if anyone has been to Hinganghat to look for it in the past fifty years. The locals knew nothing of its whereabouts nor, until my wife began spelling out his epitaph, had they ever heard the name of William Lambton.
Luckily the day was a Sunday, for to our visit coinciding with morning mass in Hinganghat we owed the discovery. Enquiries about a Christian cemetery had at first been received with blank stares from the congregation of Keralan immigrants as they spilled forth into the fields. Then, with the organ still playing, there emerged a man of more bracing faith. Mr K.J. Sebastian, an English teacher, might rather have devoted his day of rest to his young family; but grasping the gist of my story, he leapt to the challenge and sped off on his scooter, we following close behind, to explore the byways of the parish.
Hinganghat lies about fifty miles south of Nagpur and is as near the dead centre of India as anywhere. It also epitomises much that is unlovely about the country. Unless your business is cotton there can be no possible reason for turning off the Wardha road. Two