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The man and the mountain
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May 29 is Mount Everest Day. And when celebrations begin, to mark the 50th year of the first conquest of the world's highest mountain, K PRADEEP remembers the man who gave it his name.
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The southern face of Mount Everest
MOUNTAINS, as John Ruskin once said, is the beginning and end of all scenery. High mountains are a feeling which the hum of torturous cities can never provide. And the best way to experience this heady feeling is to climb to the tops.
The Nepal Himalaya is the perhaps the greatest theatre of mountaineering activity in the world. And here the drama of success and failure still provides impetus to thousands of men and women to meet the ultimate challenge. In a stretch of 800 km is situated eight peaks that rise above 26,000 feet. This includes the highest of them all, Mount Everest, that still remains the extreme test for any mountaineer.
May 29 is Everest Day and from this year the celebrations are on to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first conquest of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay way back in 1953. And when the world remembers all those 1,114 people who have reached the summit after it was conquered 50 years ago and the 180 brave souls who perished on the icy slopes of the peak, has anybody wondered who this Everest was, the guy after whom this mother of all mountains was named? Spare a thought for Sir George Everest.
A land surveyor, not very well known though he was Surveyor General of India, Sir George Everest was the man who took immense efforts to establish by triangulation, over several decades, an accurate survey framework over the whole of India, including the accurate positions and heights of all the major peaks in the massive mountain ranges of the Himalayas.
Sir George Everest
Nearly 160 years ago there were no expedition teams nor could they get to the foothills in Nepal. So observations were taken from six triangulation stations on the plain, more than 100 miles away. From there it was possible to measure with theodolites the bearings and elevation to the distant white-topped peaks, and to get values which could be calculated to the nearest foot.
When these were sorted out, it was found that several peaks rose above 28,000 feet, but only one exceeded 29,000 feet. Since there was no local name to be found, it seemed appropriate to call this highest mountain after the one man, who above all, had made the observations and calculations possible.
The height of the mountain, first published in 1856, was arrived at 29,002 feet. Later, Chinese surveyors fixed the height at 29,029. The latest surveys, completed in May 1999 through GPS satellite equipment, revealed that the mountain was in fact much taller at 29,035 feet.
Despite so many conquests of Mount Everest there has been no actual theodolite observations from the top. The reason was perhaps, as Sir Edmund Hillary said, when asked why there were no pictures of him on the summit, "Tenzing had not used a camera before; and I did not think the summit of Everest was the best place to start.''
The measurements, however, does not bother the hordes of adventurers who flock to the foothills of the Chomo Lungma (Mother Goddess of the Land) as the Tibetans call it. They aspire to join the select band who have shown the guts and gumption to encounter dangers, overcome failures to finally make it to the top of the world.
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