Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (9 page)

The British liked the idea of measuring India. It was, after all, their spoils, and it would be nice to know the size of the prize. The Raj could only be strengthened by this knowledge. Therefore, Lambton was pushed to measure more than just Mysore. Soon he had minions reporting to him and the Great Trigonometric Survey of India had begun.

Lambton’s plan was to survey a straight line up the sub-continent along the Great Indian Arc of the Meridian and another line across the sub-continent from Mangalore to Madras. The north-south line along the Great Arc would ultimately end up covering 1,600 miles from Cape Comorin in the south to Mussoorie in the north, and would take about 47 years and untold lives to complete. Off of the Great Trigonometric Survey would sprout countless secondary series by other surveyors, until almost all of India and modern-day Pakistan were shackled under a chain of triangles.

At its core, the survey method used by Lambton was just very basic trigonometry. Hold three flags up in different locations, creating a triangle (These were big triangles. Many were several miles along the hypotenuse). Measure the distance between any two of the three flags - A and B - using something like a chain, giving you length of side AB. This is your baseline. From A and B, get a site line of the third flag - C - and calculate the angles of those site lines from the baseline. You can then use that data to calculate the length of AC and BC, and the angle of the third corner C.
Viola
. The whole triangle of land has been measured! Now you can start a new triangle using one of the sides of the triangle you just measured.

Of course, that description only describes measurements on a horizontal plane, like a map. But heights of locations needed to be recorded as well. This also required basic trigonometry, but with the added challenge that one of the corners of the triangle was inevitably hidden under the earth because no ground is perfectly flat. Start by planting a flag at sea level – corner A. Go to some nearby high point and plant another flag – corner B, again connected by a chain. Calculate the angle from straight vertical at the high point B and the angle from straight horizontal at the low point A. This gives you the other two sides of the right triangle, and thus the height of the second point. As one moves up from sea level to mountainous ranges, one just keeps adding and adding elevations, triangle by triangle.

Based on the description just given, the reader may be led to think a trigonometric survey of India was technically simple but repetitive, as if the surveyors were machines, running basic calculations over and over again. But nothing could be further from the truth. Lambton, and later George Everest after Lambton’s death, faced untold challenges while measuring the sub-continent and it was these challenges that would ultimately lead to the faulty measurement of Fumu.

First there are the challenges inherent to trigonometric surveying. Take even the basic notion of measuring altitude from “sea level.” Do you start your measurement at the high tide mark, the low tide mark, or an average of the two? How do you ensure other surveyors running secondary series are doing it the same way?

There is also the issue of the Earth being an “oblate spheroid.” When calculating the vertical triangles, you must take into account the curvature of earth. Even if the effect is tiny for a single triangle, less than an inch perhaps, the error will be compounded as you tack on more triangles, Altitude measurements will soon be out of whack. So if the world is not a perfect sphere, what formula can you use reliably?

When you look over an expansive vista at mountains or other large objects in the distance, what you are seeing is actually bent by water in the atmosphere, much like looking at a fish in a fish bowl. This phenomenon is called
refraction
. Surveyors trying to get a site line on distant objects are not immune to refraction, so every calculation must take it into account.

Even more possible error is introduced into the surveyor’s calculation by variations in climate. If you used a 2,000-foot steel chain to measure the side of a triangle on a hot, humid Monday, and then re-measured on Tuesday when it was cooler and drier, you would find the location of your flags had moved slightly. Not only would the chain have shortened, but your other instruments for measurement, like theodolites and levels, would have changed as well. Surveyors have discovered calculations that can account for climate changes, but then how do you ensure your thermometers are accurate, especially if you are using more than one?

Lambton and Everest faced all of these challenges inherent to the science of trigonometric surveying. But they also faced hurdles specific to early 19
^th
Century India. For example, the best time for measurement was in the weather that accompanied the monsoon season. But of course, the monsoon season is also a high point for malaria and cholera. The two diseases wiped out innumerable porters and researchers on the survey. Lambton found elephants were best equipped to carry all of the equipment required for the survey, but because of their size, elephants were injured more often by the many stretches of dense jungle. Cultural problems sprouted up in many remote regions of the sub-continent; Lambton was more than once accused by local leaders of spying on women-folk and turning objects and people upside-down with his inverting telescope lens. Measurements in these situations often had to be done on the run or skipped completely.

With the survey going on more than forty years, it finally hit the border of Nepal and could go no further because Kathmandu barred outsiders from entering Nepal. The closest researchers could get to the distant Himalaya was the kingdom of Sikkim about one hundred miles to the east of the largest mountains in the chain. Therefore, measurement of the distant Himalaya was terribly hindered. Estimates became looser. Everest was initially underestimated and mistaken to be shorter than Kanchenjunga just because the latter was closer. Fumu was not even seen from distant Darjeeling for some time. It was not until the last researchers were packing up that Fumu would be noticed and then underestimated. The mountain simply does not stand out from any side until you are at the base of it. There are too many tall mountains surrounding it, obscuring all but its smoky summit. When a patch of snow near the top does peek out, other proximal peaks make its height less noticeable. When the fattest man in the world spends time with the second and third fattest men in the world, he does not stand out. So it went with Fumu. Social scientists might say the mountain’s measurement was thrown off by an optical illusion. Locals might say the mountain protected itself from notice with visual trickery. Regardless of one’s explanation, when Fumu finally did get measured on literally the last day of The Great Trigonometric Survey, it came in at a paltry 28,250 feet.

Clearly, the measurement of Fumu was problematic. But with all of the challenges the surveyors faced in accurately measuring India and ultimately the Himalaya of Nepal, surely the problems would have applied equally to
all
of the Himalayan measurements, not just to Fumu. In other words, if Fumu was given short shrift, would not Everest and all of the other Nepalese Himalaya have been given the same poor treatment equally? Error was rampant across the board.

Indeed, that argument would be legitimate. Based on all of the points raised so far, one could still say Fumu is not the tallest mountain in the world. The mountains may have all been mismeasured equally; Fumu because its peak being obscured, Everest because of its distance from the surveyors, and so forth. However, one last gaff occurred that must be mentioned in any discussion of Fumu – a gaff that likely stole the crown from her head and placed it illegitimately on Mount Everest…

All men see the world through the filter of their work. The banker looks at the trees in a park in summer and cannot help but see the colour of American currency. The priest looks at the same trees and sees the craftsmanship of Jehovah. Even the chef taking an evening stroll may delight in the similarity of shape between the outline of the oaks and his famous popovers. Meriwether Albright of Coventry was no different. He was an engineer who built instruments used for measurement. In the trees, Albright would see twigs as units of branches, branches as units of boughs, and boughs as units of the main trunk. He would notice how the trees were clearly planted to form a line with each sapling separated from its neighbors by eight feet, but that human error had been introduced into the calculations. Simply put, Meriwether Albright saw the world in increments.

Others might look upon that as quite cold and empty. Not Albright. He was a deeply religious man, and as he saw it, he was measuring God’s miracles. “I felt every day like I was a millionaire counting his money…and I was,” he wrote many years later. “I was drowning in the riches bestowed upon me by the Lord, and I wanted to put them in order.”

Albright was an obsessive worker, leaving his neglected old cottage seven days a week at six o’clock in the morning in order to begin work at his workshop on the other side of his fields by five minutes after six. Given the timepieces he was using, we can be sure he was rarely late. On a given dark winter morning, he would likely enter the small single room, light the lamps and a fire for the kettle, let the aroma of the grease, paraffin, and hay invade his nostrils, and then let his eyes pan across the shining brass and steel. The objects he discerned in that dim light ranged in size from flat, one-foot rulers to clocks six feet in diameter. Albright would then spend the day fabricating and hammering metal, running and re-running objects through the dividing engine, calibrating springs, oiling gears, and punctuating the whole process with sips of tea.

He was known throughout Europe for his precision. No matter what instrument he was building – clock, compass, yardstick – Albright was unrivaled. When it came to clocks for example, many people including the employs of the Greenwich Observatory felt Albright had surpassed even the Swiss. He received letters from railroad concerns in Russia asking for his services. Despite bad blood between England and France, Parisian builders and architects wrote to him for help. Albright had to turn down most of the offers because he was already too busy. Friends urged him to expand his business; hire employees, build a factory, and retire on his wealth. Other businesses in Coventry goaded him as well. Any successful business in Coventry could prove beneficial to other businesses in the area. But Albright refused. He truly did not care about wealth. He liked the peace and quiet of his workshop. All that mattered to him were the creation of his objects, the goal of precise measurement, and love of God. But even more than all of this, there was spending time with his daughter, Katherine.

At the age of six, Katherine Albright was tall for her age. Other girls in town called her “Giantess.” As awkward as she may have felt, she was also a beauty, with long black curls and big hazel eyes. “Her eyebrows were permanently fixed in a position of skepticism, one raised slightly higher than the other,” Albright once wrote. “This gave her a very hard but intelligent look.” She was an artist. She spent much time before bed painting still lifes and portraits of herself or her father. Her hands were constantly covered in oil paints which ultimately ended up all over the furniture and walls. Meriwether loved that kind of mess generated by creativity.

Katherine did not have much time for other children, favoring the company of her father, and Meriwether wouldn’t have it any other way. His wife had died giving birth to Katherine, and with the help of local friends, he had raised her to schooling age. Now he took care of Katherine by himself, and he reveled in it. If Meriwether was not in his workshop, then he and Katherine were strolling through town or taking hikes along the river or attending church together. She was only six, but Meriwether confided in her constantly. He also let her help him in the workshop when school was out. “I remember speaking to her very early on about the importance of what we do and the magnificence of His wonders.” Albright wrote in prison years later. “I told her the volume of a drop of dew, the seconds in a minute, the furlongs in a mile, each was a glimmering tile in a giant mosaic. If we can only quantify the tiles, and look at them from afar, the mosaic will show us the Face of God.”

Then Katherine became ill. No one is sure what illness she had, but all signs point to consumption. She could not get up in the morning. Already thin, she began to waste away. Her skin became pale and her breaths became short. The coughing fits were relentless. “The single raised eyebrow lowered, removing the unique character that was Katherine. Her eyelids were half-moons and she stared at nothing. Then she was dead.”

Meriwether was devastated. He stayed in his home for months, unable to even visit his workshop. He did not attend church. When he did start venturing outside, locals saw him ambling slowly, head down, mumbling to himself in a voice on the verge of tears.

A neighbor who had helped Albright raise Katherine finally visited him and begged him to return to work. She felt it would help him heal. “’Look again to God’s miracles’ she said to me. I took her advice. I went back to the workshop and began to tinker again.”

But something had snapped in Albright’s head. He could not see the reason for measuring the world anymore because the magic that used to cover every thing like gossamer was gone. He did work, but his production rate was dangerously slow. Customers complained. The world was growing, commerce was on the march, and the need for Albright’s instruments was greater than ever.

Then Albright came up with the solution to his problem. God’s miracles were still there to be understood, but the miracles were now severely lessened by the removal of Katherine. And so he would continue to build the tools that measure the world, but he would subtract out what was lost. He took his old dividing engine out back and destroyed it with endless blows from a mallet. Then he began building another one, with each notch on the wheel slightly further away from its neighbor than it should be. All measurements arising from the dividing engine would be smaller. The value of Katherine was removed from each inch, each second, and each degree.