The Road to Little Dribbling Read Online Free PDF Page B

explored the pedestrian lane, called Warwick Street, and had a cup of tea, then strolled down to the seafront, which was dominated by a sensationally ugly multistory parking lot. You do wonder what planning officials think. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Instead of having attractive hotels and apartment blocks beside the sea, let’s put up a giant windowless car park. That’ll bring the crowds in!” I thought about walking the rest of the way to Brighton, but then I realized that what I could see in the hazy, uttermost distance was Brighton itself and it was clearly a long way away—more than eight miles, according to my trusty Ordnance Survey map, and that was considerably farther than I cared to go on foot just at the moment.
    So I got on another bus, all but identical to the first one, and resumed my journey by road. The trip began promisingly enough, but soon the coast road became a long string of scrapyards, building supply outlets, car repair shops, and finally a giant power station, as we made our way into Shoreham. We got caught in a long tailback because of roadworks and I fell asleep again.
    —
    I awoke in Hove, exactly where I wished to be, and exited the bus with my usual stumbling haste. I had recently by chance read about George Everest, the man for whom Mount Everest was named, and learned that he was buried in St. Andrew’s churchyard in Hove, and I thought I might look in on his grave. Until I read about old George, I had never paused to wonder how the mountain got its name. It turns out that it should never have been named for him. For one thing, he never saw it. Mountains, in India or elsewhere, hardly played a part in his life at all.

    Everest was born in 1790 in either Greenwich or Wales (depending on which sources you credit), the son of a lawyer, and educated at military schools in Marlow and Woolwich before being packed off to the Far East, where he became a surveyor. In 1817, he was sent to Hyderabad, in India, to serve as chief assistant on an enterprise known as the Great Trigonometrical Survey. The aim of the project was to survey an arc of longitude across India as a way of determining the circumference of the Earth. It was the life’s work of an interestingly obscure fellow named William Lambton. Nearly everything about Lambton is uncertain. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says he was born sometime in the period 1753 to 1769—an arrestingly broad range of possibility. Where he grew up is quite unknown, as are all the other details of his early life and education. All that can be said is that in 1781 he joined the army, went to Canada to survey its boundary with the new United States, and then was dispatched to India. There he got the idea of surveying his arc. He worked on it exhaustively for some twenty years before dying abruptly in northern India in 1823—though exactly where, when, and what of are not known. George Everest merely completed the project. It was important work, but it went nowhere near the Himalayas.
    Photos of Everest from late in life show a cheerless face almost perfectly encircled by white hair and beard. Life in India didn’t much agree with him. He spent twenty years there more or less constantly unwell, suffering from typhus and chronic bouts of Yellapurum fever and diarrhea. He spent extended periods at home on sick leave. He returned permanently to England in 1843, long before the mountain was named. It is almost the only mountain in Asia to have an English name. British cartographers were generally fairly scrupulous about preserving native designations, but Mount Everest was known locally by a range of names—Deodhunga, Devadhunga, Bairavathan, Bhairavlangur, Gnalthamthangla, Chomolungma, and several more—so there wasn’t one to fix on. The British most commonly called it Peak XV. No one at the time had any idea that it was the tallest mountain in the world, and therefore deserving of special attention, so when someone put Everest’s name on the