Legend could hardly leave this meeting between East and West as it had happened. The theme was embellished with variations and for two thousand years, the name of the Gymnosophists, or Naked Philosophers, remained part of the common culture of lettered men. In India their meetings with Alexander passed through his Romanceinto the Sayings of Milinda,a classic Buddhist text; in the Mediterranean, they were prominent in the works and poems of scholars in Renaissance Florence; in England, after the death of Cromwell, Puritan gentlemen still pinned their revolutionary fervour on the Gymnosophists' ideal, praising the Indians in pamphlets for being Puritans before their time, and denouncing Alexander as the type of a monarch like Charles II. The Gymnosophists' fame had spread far beyond their town by the Murree hills, and all because a pupil of Aristotle had crossed the Hindu Kush in search of the eastern Ocean and a pupil of Diogenes had left the boats on his native island of Cos, joined the expedition and agreed, in India, to go out in the midday sun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Among the peculiarities of Taxila there was one which was to matter more to Alexander than any Gymnosophist or elephant: the first spring rains had begun to fall. But he paid no attention, though his Indian wise men were famed for their knowledge of the weather, and he turned to the task in hand. This was plain enough. The rajahs of the Punjab had their local animosities and, as usual, Alexander meant to play them off against each other. Ambhi of Taxila told of his neighbour Porus, who ruled to the south-east across the boundary river Jhelum: he had elephants and a large army and was likely to prove troublesome. Friendlier rajahs to the north were received and reinstated, as Alexander's thoughts had now turned eastwards, unwilling to interfere with native government provided his lines were assured: Ambhi was allowed to wear the royal diadem, happy in his reward of a thousand talents of booty, gold and silver tableware, Persian dress and thirty caparisoned horses, to the disgust of at least one Macedonian officer who could not see any merit in a decadent Indian.

In early May Alexander recruited 5,000 Indians and left Taxila, never to return to the Tamranala river and its province. His campaign in Swat had been no more immediately successful than any other attempt in history to exterminate mountain guerrillas. He had built walls, left Macedonian garrisons and restored the native chieftains wherever possible, but within three months, the tribesmen round Pir-Sar were to rise in revolt and murder his satrap. It needed harsher punishment to put them down for another eight years. As for Taxila, it too received a garrison and a settlement of invalided soldiers, but it was not for another two hundred years that the presence of Greeks in Iran and India forced it to break with its past. Then, had Alexander returned, he would have found a very different city, no longer the shambling disorder of an Indian slum but the neat rectangle of a Greek street plan, eventually to be defended by a stone-built wall whose twenty-foot width was buttressed with square towers.

North-west up the valley, Pushkalavati, City of the Lotus, was to wear a similar new look: its alleys would become broad boulevards, whose straight lines were edged with regular blocks of shops and town houses,

broken here and there by a Buddhist shrine. When Greek culture overtook the towns of the north-west Punjab, it did so decisively; some three hundred years after Alexander, the new town at Taxila was overlooked by a temple, perhaps for fire-worship, whose facade was distinguished by classic Ionic pillars. These changes were part of a different story, the conquests of the Greek kings who emerged in the province of Bactria a hundred years after Alexander, and of the later Scythian nomads who seem to have continued the Greek city plans which they saw on their way from Sogdia into India. Alexander had deposited in furthest Asia the great-grandfathers of Greeks who would one day alter city life in the plains near Rawal-Pindi, but he could take no credit for the change himself.

The road to the river Jhelum was short, flat and easy. An envoy had been sent to Porus, asking him to bring his tribute and meet Alexander at the river-frontier: Porus replied that he would come to a meeting, certainly, but his tribute would only be armed men. There was nothing for it but to fight. A march of no miles brought men and elephants to a suitable camp, probably near modern Haranpur, the crossing-point of the Jhelum for Sultan Mahmud 1,400 years later and nowadays the bridgehead for the British-built railway. Even without binoculars, scouts could hardly miss the outlines of Porus's army on the far bank three miles to the south: his cavalry seemed to number 5,000, his infantry more than 30,000, and as the Macedonians liked to exaggerate their enemies, there is little doubt that his forces were very much fewer than Alexander's. But his elephants brought to a head the anxieties of the past few months: two hundred, it seemed to the attackers, waited in harness for the signal to advance. In between the two armies, the river was rapidly rising, swollen by the prelude to the June monsoons. Alexander had neither the time nor the cover to ship elephants of his own to the far bank: Porus had the defender's advantage and only a tactical master-piece would show him that the defensive, at least on the battlefield, can be a very mixed blessing. Centuries later, when Alexander's histories were being read to Napoleon in Egypt, it was the forthcoming battle of the Jhelum that particularly caught his admirer's attention; not as grand as Gaugamela, it was subtler than anything seen in the field before.

At Haranpur, beneath the Salt Range mountains and west of the Pabbi hills, the Jhelum flows fast in its bed, about half a mile wide. As soon as Porus saw Alexander's encampment, he sent pickets further up the river bank and moved down to guard the nearest crossing in person. His planning was predictable, but it sufficed to block Alexander's path: 'The huge mass of his elephants stood along the bank and when carefully goaded, they wearied the ear with their hideous trumpeting.' Alexander could not cross a swollen river against animals who scared his horses so much that they would probably jump off their rafts in mid-stream and swim back to safety: he therefore took to a ruse, buying time for reconnaissance, while Porus saw no reason to make the first attack. Even the monsoon rains were soon to serve Alexander's purpose.

As at Gaugamela, he began his battle with a war of nerves. Boat parties and leather rafts ventured daily on to the river as if for an attack and sailed up and down out of bowshot, annoying the pickets on the far bank; the army was split into patrols and ordered to make, such a noise that Porus would live on the alert. Even the Macedonians were kept under a false impression. Word had been spread in camp that it would not be possible to cross the Jhelum during the monsoons and therefore the men should prepare to bivouac until late autumn. Food was ostentatiously carted from the nearby country and stored where Porus's scouts could see it. Noting the supplies, the rajah presumed that Alexander meant delay.

And yet, even after a week or two he could not be certain. By night, he could hear the enemy cavalry cantering up and down their bank, and breaking the calm of the Punjab darkness with their alalalalai s . As the din grew louder, his guards had to move to keep up with it; elephants were unloosed and hurried up the line, parallel with Alexander's own horsemen. Fortunately they are not animals who need more than three hours' sleep, so their tempers did not suffer. But for the men it was most exhausting. As soon as they had their enemy covered, the noise died away, only to begin again elsewhere. Night after night, these sham attacks continued, until Porus's guards would no longer play Alexander's game. They had seen their enemies' stores and they trusted in the coming monsoon; next time, they could stay at their posts and pass the night in peace.