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India is the country that Columbus was trying to reach by going the other way around the World. When he bumped into America he thought he had reached India, so he called the people he found here Indians. He did not find out until later that America was not India at all, but a new and unknown land, and that the people were really not Indians at all, but Red Men.
India is shut off from the rest of Asia on the north by the highest wall of mountains in the World; they arecalled the Himalayas, Him-al-ay-as. The highest mountain on the face of the globe is in this range; it is called Mount Everest, after an English engineer named Everest, who measured its height. No one has ever been to the top, yet we know exactly how high it is. An engineer can find out such things. He can tell exactly howhigh a tree, a church-steeple, or a mountain is without leaving the ground. This mountain is twenty-nine thousand and two feet high—more than five miles high. The top and sides of Mount Everest are covered with snowand ice which never melts away and will always be there until the crack of doom.
Men have tried and tried again to climb to the top and many have lost their lives in attempting the climb, but no one has ever been able to get there. The top reaches so high up into the sky that there is very littleair up there, and men have to take along canned air to breathe. If they attempt to climb without canned air,they are able to take but a single step and then must stop to breathe many times, like a dog panting for breath, and every few steps they must rest awhile before going on.
