With it went responsibility for the Great Arc. At last the direction of the world’s longest meridional measurement was his; Greenwich would be proud of him. For the next twenty years George Everest would make the Great Arc his personal affair. At thirty-two, he was younger than Lambton had been when he first launched the Survey, and less obviously a servant to science. No portrait of Everest exists from this period but, in a pen drawing dated 1843, he appears to have retained the Olympian profile of an ambitious youth. Black hair, close-cropped, surmounts the cloudless brow; a frigid stare complements the long cornice of a nose. Glimpsed looming by lamplight over the circle of the Great Theodolite, he may have looked a towering figure. Yet his stature was modest and the imperious brow was belied by a tight mouth and an irrelevant chin. Muttonchop whiskers only emphasised these deficiencies and, in old age, would be allowed to encroach across them, smothering his lower face in a tangle of beard.
