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The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named. John Keay
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isbn 9780007404520
Автор произведения John Keay
Издательство HarperCollins
THE GREAT ARC
The Dramatic Taleof how India was Mappedand Everest was Named
JOHN KEAY
For Julia
Know …
That on the summit whither thou art bound
A geographic Labourer pitched his tent,
With books supplied and instruments of art,
To measure height and distance; lonely task,
Week after week pursued!
From ‘Written with a slate pencil on a stone
on the side of the mountain of Black Comb’,
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1818
India
Contents
8 So Far as Our Knowledge Extends
9 Through the Haze of Hindustan
The Great Arc and Associated Series
Some proper names in the text, especially place-names, will appear to be mis-spelled. This may be because a spelling acceptable to everyone has been hard to establish; or it may be because I have adopted some nineteenth-century spellings in order to be consistent with those used in the quoted extracts (e.g. ‘Kistna’ for ‘Krishna’, ‘Siwaliks’ for ‘Shivaliks’, ‘Ganges’ for ‘Ganga’, etc.). I trust that purists will show indulgence and that all the names are at least recognisable. In the case of the Bengali genius ‘Radhanath Sickdhar’, the spelling is that which he himself used, however improbable it now looks.
THE GREAT ARC AND ASSOCIATED SERIES
Pressed about why Mount Everest is so named I would once, perhaps like most people, have come up with the explanation that it was as good a name as any. For a geographical feature of such obvious permanence and precedence, ‘Everest’ seems to say it all. Up there, more aloof from the bustle of life than anywhere else on earth, the raised snows proffer a pledge of peace, a promise of lasting repose, of being ‘ever-at-rest’. Presumably some international body had ordained the name; or perhaps it was a translation of the mountain’s local title. It scarcely mattered. Either way, it was perfectly acceptable.
But, as I now know, these suppositions were totally wrong. That the world’s highest point is in fact called after George Everest, a controversial British Colonel who had never even seen the mountain, let alone climbed it, first dawned on me when I was writing a book about the exploration of Kashmir. Everest did not feature in the region, either as man or mountain, but an institution, dear to the Colonel’s heart and known as the Survey of India, did. Most of Kashmir, including the Karakoram mountains, had first been measured and mapped by men of the Indian Survey. And the Survey being