High Exposure by David Breashears

Author:David Breashears [David Breashears]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847677389
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2009-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

STRANGE WINDS

CHAPTER EIGHT

Nameless Tower, Karakoram, Pakistan.

After Dawa Nuru’s death I began to understand that even though I’d climbed Everest more than once, and might return to it again, it wasn’t just another goal I could reach and then rereach, and then forget. I felt a deep inner pull toward Everest. It had become—and remains—my interior landscape. For me, the mountain had taken on a rich and vital life of its own.

Every aspect of the mountain fascinated me. In 19871 was offered the chance to see Everest in a totally new way. The PBS science series NOVA was interested in a film I’d proposed about the mapping and measuring of Everest, and I was eager to be the eyes through which the world could step back and reexamine this magnificent mountain. The challenge was to try to see Everest the way Westerners had first seen it a century ago.

I found myself studying history, math, optics, and surveying techniques to understand the Western beginnings of the mountain, rooted in British colonial history. No matter where they extended their empire, the British immediately took surveys and made maps. Roads, railroads, and trade routes followed. If British mapmaking had strategic and commercial value, it also served to measure the planet. The Survey of India wasn’t initially directed at finding mountains and assessing their height. It had to do with something called the Great Arc of India, that is, measuring an arc of longitude that would accurately describe the size and shape of the earth. The Great Arc project had been started by the British in the 1700s, in the southern tip of India. George Everest, surveyor general of India from 1830 to his retirement in 1843, oversaw the survey’s progress north, to the foothills of the Himalayas. It was a singularly monumental undertaking.

My goal in filming the NOVA documentary was to see Everest the way the earliest surveyors viewed it, from one of the surveying towers constructed of mud bricks. Hundreds of thirty-foot towers, or stations, had been built throughout India for the sole purpose of achieving a line of sight with other stations or points not yet on the map. The British surveying teams placed an instrument called a theodolite on top of each of the stations to take their exacting measurements. Nepal was closed to Westerners, so the survey teams worked along the Indian side of the India-Nepal border, in a region called the Terai. It was from there, in the winter of 1849-50, that they measured a blip on the northern horizon which they designated Peak XV. It was 110 miles away. At the time, they had no idea it was the highest mountain on earth, though a mountain worthy of that superlative had to be out there somewhere. The calculations from those measurements, which defined Peak XV as the highest point on the globe, would not come until six years later.

The discovery of the planet’s highest point stirred imaginations around the world, but as far as the Survey of India could ascertain, the peak had no local name.

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