A NEW WORLD
I wanted to find out how high Kilimanjaro was. After a book has been written and rewritten five or six times, rows of figures are apt to do strange things. What with copying and recopying and infinite corrections scribbled all around them, they have a way of playing hide-and-seek with themselves. One moment they are one thing. The next moment they are something else. If you have ever been snow-blind, you will know what I mean.
“But,” you will answer, “that really can’t be much of a problem. Look it up in some reliable handbook of geography or in an encyclopedia or in an atlas and copy it.”
That would be very simple if these blessed geographies, encyclopedias and atlases were ever able to agree upon any given fact. But apparently they are not. I have got most of the standard volumes on geography right here on my desk and they are a subject of constant delight. Not that they are particularly amusing reading. Geography is not supposed to be a very amusing subject. But when it comes to doing tricks with mountain tops and oceans they are sublime. River basins and the drainage areas of inland seas stretch and shrink and stretch. The mean average temperature of any given part of the world never stays mean or average very long but makes the mercury of the different meteorological stations behave like a stock-market ticker during a panic. And the bottom of the ocean heaves and sighs like Noodle’s tummy after a particularly exciting chase after a cat.
I don’t want to destroy any further illusions in a world that has already lost its faith in so many things. But I come out of this struggle with “the facts of geography” having a profound doubt about all further vital statistics. I suppose that this unfortunate diversity of opinions is the result of our incurable vice of nationalism. Every little country must have a few figures all its own, so as to be able to manifest its sovereign independence.
But that was merely a detail. There are other problems, of which I shall enumerate a few, One half of the world measures weight and distance according to the decimal system. The other half sticks to the duodecimal system. To revaluate metres and kilometres into yards and miles accurately, not merely approximately, is no easy matter, as the gun manufacturers of the Great War learned to their intense discomfort. However, with the help of a competent mathematical assistant (I am no genius at that sort of thing) the necessary calculations can be made. But how about the proper names of countries and mountains and rivers? How should these be spelled? The Gulf of Chili – Gulf of Tjili – Gulf of Tschili – Gulf of Tshi-li – take your choice, my friends! Hindu-Kush – Hindoe-Koesch – Hindu-Kutch – Hindu-Kusj which do you pre-fer? But that would not be so bad if at least the different big language groups had been able to agree upon the proper way of spelling Russian or Chinese or Japanese or Spanish names. But every major tongue has at least two and sometimes three conflicting systems of transcribing these strange tongues into the native vernacular.
To add to this confusion of tongues, every tiny scrap of land that can boast of a dialect of its own now claims full and equal rights for “the sacred language of its ancestors,” and the map of Europe that used to be fairly simple before the war has recently blossomed forth with a multicoloured linguistic flora which makes the reading of Mr Cook’s old and reliable “Continental Railroad Guide” a labour only to be compared to the efforts of Champollion while tackling his first-half dozen Egyptian hieroglyphics.
I am not trying to formulate an alibi. What I have writ, I have writ, but please be lenient with some of my heights and depths. When eminent encyclopedias and statistical handbooks contradict themselves three or four times on three or four different pages, what is the poor amateur going to do?
I suppose in the end he will do what I did. He will call a plague upon all these learned tomes and buy himself a copy of the “World Almanac” and he will say: “I am going to stick to this one book and if anybody wants to sue me because I have made Kilimanjaro 19,710 feet high (in the Britannica it is 19,321; in Andrews’ Geography, 19,000; in Tarr and McMurry, 19,780; in Oxford Advanced Atlas, 19,320; in the World Almanac, 19,710) I shall tell him to go and see the publishers of the World-Telegram, Inc., and let him fight it out with them.”
But what I was going to say when I started upon this Kilimanjaro – Kiliman’djaro – Kilimantscharo – Kilimansjaro topic was this. I was looking for my World Almanac, which had inadvertently hidden itself behind a dozen atlases and during that search I get hold of a pamphlet that had been sent me a short while before. It was a pamphlet devoted to the life and the work of Sir Ronald Ross. In very polite terms the author hinted that Sir Ronald, if not absolutely in want, was so far removed from affluence that we might do something about making him at least reasonably comfortable during the rest of his days – and may they be many. Of course his needs were not exorbitant Scientists rarely count their reward in dollars and dimes. But having completely ruined his health in the pursuit of his studies, he could do nicely with a more convenient sort of invalid’s chair.