It was in a nice little bookshop in a small town in New Hampshire where we acquired our original copy of Into the Silence, The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis. About three years ago, perhaps four. My husband, knowing how interested I am in the Himalaya and mountaineering had pointed it out to me, and it was a must-have.

We'd always visit that little store for the past ten years or so when we were in the area on our annual Waterville Valley getaways to revisit old familiar mountain trails and the sublime landscape we had become familiar with, our children in tow, over the course of some thirty-forty years or so. Our granddaughter too, on those occasions when she accompanied us in later years, looked forward to that book shop excursion.

We were surprised but not shocked to discover several years back that the shop had closed. It had been located in a half-empty mall, and it was obvious that the town, in a winter-skiing area, had been attempting to reinvent itself as a tourist draw. With its closing, only a larger second-hand rather tawdry bookshop was left for the locals to frequent. It had Internet services which the smaller bookshop hadn't had.

There was another bookshop some miles distant in another, larger town which was a bigger draw for tourism. We once thought we'd shop there only to find we weren't welcome with our over-the-shoulder bag holding our little toy poodle, Riley. Their loss in custom, but our loss in an enjoyable book-shopping site closed off to us.

"Geographers had long suspected that the earth, flattened at the poles, was not a perfect sphere. But the extent of the distortion, of critical importance to science and cartography, was unknown. The Great Trigonometrical Survey set out in 1806 to solve the mystery by calibrating with a precision previously unimagined the true shape of the planet, the curvature of the globe, by measuring an arc of longitude across the face of India. The basic idea was rather straightforward: if one can establish three visible points in a landscape, and if one knows the distance between two, one can measure at each of these the angle to the third, unknown point and, with trigonometry, determine its distance and position. Once the third point has been thus established, it can form with one of the known points the base of a new triangle from which the coordinates of a new reference point on the horizon, often a mountain or other prominent landscape, can be established. Thus, over time, a chain of triangles was created, a Great Arc that ran sixteen hundred miles south to north over the length of the subcontinent.
Distance was determined with calibrated chains and measuring rods, which implied teams of men hacking through jungles, crossing swamps, climbing across the face of glaciers. To measure the angles with the requisite precision required the finest of instruments, enormous brass theodolites that weighed as much as a thousand pounds and needed a dozen men to be carried. Essentially elaborate telescopes that could pivot both vertically and horizontally to measure all angles in a plane, these theodolites had to be mounted, erect and perfectly immobile, on a circular platform bolted to the top of a thirteen-yard-long spar, which itself was dug into the ground and secured by long stays. A second platform, complete with scaffolding, had to be built alongside so that the observer might take the measurements. The slightest movement of the theodolite would render the calculations useless.
For more than forty years, the intrepid members of the Survey of India, supported by armies of laborers who suffered and died by the score, marched these exquisite instruments across the length of the subcontinent. Their seasons were short and desperate, for only with the monsoon did the haze clear and the dust settle from the air. Tormented with fevers, perched in the ice on the summits of mountains, or in empty deserts where thirty-foot platforms had to be built of stones, they meticulously recorded their observations. Quite literally nothing stood in their way. If necessary to establish a point of triangulation and properly position a theodolite, they razed entire villages, leveled sacred hills, and crashed into fragments the facades of ancient temples.
By the 1830s the Great Arc had reached the foothills of the Himalaya, the highest and youngest mountains on earth, a wall of white peaks a hundred miles deep, stretching in a gentle curve for fifteen hundred miles, from the Brahmaputra to the Indus, a distance, the British would discover, equal to that of London to the Urals of Russia. Here the members of the survey would hesitate before branching east and west, through the foothills and the malarial forests of the Terai, where a new series of baselines would be established, marked by observation posts built of mud bricks, also thirty feet high, from which they would look up and stare into the hidden heights of a mountain range that fired their imaginations. Above the heat and dust of the Indian plain, rising out of the forests of Burma, were more than a thousand mountains that soared beyond 20,000 feet, elevations scarcely comprehensible to the European mind."
Into the Silence, The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, Wade Davis, c.2011