because it was reported to be the best supplied, he launched into an arduous six-month campaign with Sasigupta to guide him. The hill tribes were numerous, and they had determined to resist valiantly among mountains and fast-flowing rivers which were not to be bridged lightly, even in December. Failing their surrender, Alexander was not disposed to be any more kind to resistant patriots than usual: it boded ill for the style of the war that he was wounded at the first city and 'the Macedonians killed all prisoners, angry that they had pained their Alexander'.

But the grim business of war had its compensations. Up in the green valleys of the westerly Swat hills, perhaps near the peak of Koh-i-nor, camp had been pitched on a chilly December night and the men began to search for firewood at a height of some 5,000 feet. A bonfire was built and when timber ran short the troops smashed up square boxes of cedar-wood which they found conveniently distributed over the hillside: they did not realize they were burning the natives' coffins. Before long the natives retaliated, but a brief attack rebuffed them and they preferred to surrender. Their envoys found Alexander in his tent 'still dusty from the march but fully armed, wearing a helmet and holding a spear; they were amazed at the sight of him and falling to the ground, they kept a long silence'. Through interpreters, terms were agreed: to Alexander's pleasure, the city was ruled by aristocrats, three hundred of whom were to serve in his cavalry while another hundred, after a brief argument, were left to keep the nobility in power. In the course of conversation, he became aware of a startling fact: these tribesmen had been settled by the god Dionysus, their town was the elusive sanctuary of Nysa and the mountain was therefore a holy place. In Greece the ecstatic followers of Dionysus wreathed their brows in ivy; on this Indian hill, alone of the ones they had visited, common ivy was growing in profusion. What better proof could the common soldier want? Dionysus had been this way before them.

Talk of Dionysus was spiriting to tired troopers and Alexander himself 'wanted the tales of the god's wandering to be true'. The cult of the god was old and fierce in his native Macedonia and no son of Olympias could underestimate it. He was keen as always to investigate, and the Companion Cavalry and Royal Squadron of Infantry were invited to join him in visiting the shady clumps of trees, the myrtle, box and laurel, symbols of the god and a blessing to eyes long wearied by rocky outcrop and dry salt desert. The place was a gardener's paradise, and the soldiers picked the common ivy and twined its acrid stems into wreaths. Crowned with ivy garlands, they sang hymns to the god on the hillside and addressed him by his many names, whereupon Alexander offered him a formal sacrifice: 'Many of the not unpromincnt officers around him garlanded themselves with ivy and - so several have written - were promptly possessed by the god and raised the call of Dionysus, running in his frantic rout.' T he Bacchai, the Bacchai... - the words of the most memorable chorus in Greek drama, probably written in Macedonia itself, may have sounded on a Pakistani hillside.

This episode deserves to be believed, but its explanation is difficult. It is plausible to look first for an Indian background, and there are parallels which seem impressive. Alexander's officers named the hillside Meros, the Greek word for a thigh and a link with Dionysus who was believed to have been born from the thigh of Zeus. But the Indians may have led them to the name, for in early Hindu cosmology the world was believed to float like the four petals of a lotus around its central mountain Meru, which rose out of the surrounding waters to the peak of the easeful gods. Alexander might have heard the Indians in his camp talking of Meru and identified the word, as so often, with what he knew in Greek. As for the god himself, an Indian Dionysus was repeatedly mentioned by later Greek visitors to India and among the native pantheon none is more plausible than the Hindu god Shiva, who is worshipped by dancers and cymbalists, dressed like Greek Bacchants in the skins of wild animals. Ivy, Meru and Shiva might seem to have encouraged the Macedonians' fancy: scholars in Egyptian Alexandria later blamed the incident on Alexander's love of flattery, but they were men with dry minds. They had never seen the Swati highlands or shared the hazards of an Indian explorer.

But there are difficulties in this Indian explanation, for the people of Dionysus conspire in a stranger story which tends to discredit it. Alexander was in the modern region of Chitral, which adjoins Nuristan on the eastern border of Afghanistan, home of the people long known as the Kafirs, whose kinsmen lived in Chitral and the Swat highlands where they share the Kafirs' language and many of their stylish folk tales. The Kafirs are one of the least accessible and most enchanting peoples in Asia. Their skin is sometimes fair, their hair is occasionally blond. They have aquiline noses and noble foreheads and they wear a woollen headdress which has seemed to the imaginative to be like the broad-brimmed Kausia of the Macedonians. Ivy abounds in their well-treed mountains and the people, like Dionysus, are conspicuously fond of wine; their music and singing are famous, their architecture of carved wood is distinctive and often ornate. It was inevitable that these Kafirs should have attracted the attention of the Victorian British; in the nineteenth century the Kafirs did not yet practise as Hindus or Muslims, so some said they were early Christians, uncorrupted by the Catholic Church, others that they were Jews, while

others believed that they were Greek descendants of Alexander's garrisons, and hence had a European look, a story which was as old as Marco Polo and is still repeated; Kipling even paid these proto-Hellenes the honour of a story. But exploration proved that they neither spoke Greek nor cared for Jesus, and their origins soon lost popular appeal. But one strange fact had been noticed: alone of the tribes in the Hindu Kush the Kafirs expose their dead in wooden coffins, and so the Macedonians' search for firewood springs to mind: the troops had smashed up the coffins which lay to hand round their bivouacs and the custom is probably a link across thousands of years, so that the Kafirs of Nuristan are indeed descendants of the people whom Alexander met. This casts doubts on a link between Dionysus and Shiva, god of the Hindus.

Research has discovered that the Kafirs speak a language whose roots derive from the earliest Indo-European dialects; Kafirs, then, are descendants of the first invaders to sweep west from India to Europe several thousand years before Alexander; hence their European looks, a feature which also owes something to their attraction for enterprising British ladies on the north-west frontier. Their religion, before they were forced to become Muslim, contained no Indian god to be compared with Dionysus; they worshipped a sky god, whom the Greeks would have called Zeus Ombrios, and a demon god in the shape of a stone, but they were not Hindus with a knowledge of Shiva. However, they did have a lively cult of the ibex or mountain goat, as befitted the people of one of its most prolific haunts, and as the Greek Dionysus's worship included the killing and eating of a goat the parallel is very impressive. Possibly Alexander saw or heard of this equally ecstatic cult among the Kafirs, whose link with his own Dionysus seemed to be confirmed by their natural gardens and the western appearance of their spokesmen.

After Dionysus, it was time for Heracles. First, the rival son of Zeus made his laborious way across the waters of the Alishang and Kunar rivers, keeping far north and storming a strongly built citadel high on the Katgala pass: the ground was sheer, the walls protected by ditches and the defenders encouraged by 7 ,000 hired troops from farther east. In a preliminary skirmish Alexander was wounded in the ankle by an arrow from the city battlements and as his foot hung numb with pain, an Athenian all-in wrestler, who had long been applying his skills in the ranks, tried to atone for its bleeding by quoting the king a line of Homer: 'Ichor,' he remarked, 'such as flows from the veins of the immortal gods.' 'Nonsense,' Alexander retorted, 'it's not ichor: it's blood.' He had deserved divine honours by his prowess and he wished it to be known that he was specially favoured by his father Zeus. But he had no illusions about his own mortality and he would never have claimed that he had himself turned into a god.