Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain, Jonathan Bloom [best ebook reader TXT] 📗

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 19th 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,