Himalayas
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
THE, or the HIMALAYA MOUNTAINS, an extensive mountain range of Asia, and the loftiest in the world, bounding Hindustan on the N. and separating it from the tableland of Tibet, which stands 10,- This chain is 000 feet above the sea. continuous W. with the Hindu Kush and Behor-Tagh, and E. with the Chinese tableland of Yun-nan; but the term Himalaya is usually restricted by geographers to that portion of the range lying between the passages of the Indus and Brahmaputra; the former being in lat. 35° N., and lon. 75° E., and the latter in 28° 15′ N., and lon. 96° E. The direction of the range, as thus defined, is S. E. from the Indus to the Gunduk, and thence E. to its termination. Its entire length is 1,900 miles; its average breadth is 90 miles, and the surface which it covers is estimated at 160,000 square miles. The average height of the Himalayas has been estimated at 15,700 feet. The principal peaks are: Mount Everest, 29,140 feet; Kunchinjinga, in Sikkim, 28,178 feet; W. peak of the same , 27,826 feet; feet; Dhawalagiri , in Nepal, 26,862 feet; Dhawahir, in Kumaon, 25, 749 feet. The passes over the main ridge amount to about 20, a few of which only are practicable for horses, sheep being principally used as beasts of burden over the steep acclivities. The only rock sufficiently extensive to characterize the geological formation of this great chain is gneiss . The chief minerals hereto found are gold -dust, copper, lead, iron, antimony, manganese, sulphur, alum, and rock-salt. The mammalia of the Himalayas are chiefly confined to ruminating animals , a few varieties only of the horse and cat tribes being found in these regions . The wild horse is seen on the N. side of the range; but the principal tenants of the hilly slopes are the yak, much used as a beast of burden by the Tartars, the ghurls (Capra ægagrus), of which the Cashmere and Tibet goats are varieties , the Nepal stag, the black deer, the chirn, or one-horned antelope, the goral, and the nylghau. Among the birds are the lammergeyer, the common cuckoo , the Impeyan pheasant, the red-legged crow , and the wood-pigeon.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's wrote in 1921 that Mount Everest stood 29,140 feet; the summit was surveyed at 29,028 feet in 1954 and, after a joint Nepali-Chinese remeasurement, agreed in 2020 at 8,848.86 metres (29,031.7 feet). No one had stood on it when the entry was printed — the first British reconnaissance expedition set out that very year, and Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top on 29 May 1953. The biggest shift is in explanation rather than description: the range's gneiss and its height are now understood as the product of the Indian plate colliding with Eurasia roughly 50 million years ago, a process still lifting the mountains a few millimetres a year and still generating earthquakes, as in Nepal in 2015. The twenty difficult passes have been joined by motor roads, airstrips and a trekking and climbing industry that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
Written for this edition, 2026.