was of the very largest size and had shown remarkable intelligence and care for its king. While Porus was still active, it would vigorously repel his attackers, but when it saw he was flagging under his many wounds, afraid that he might fall off, it bent its knees and gently lowered itself to the ground; with its trunk, it tenderly took hold of each spear and drew them from his master's body.

Alexander and a few Companions came forward to meet their royal enemy; 'Alexander! my noble lord', the Persians' great epic poem, centuries later, made him say, 'Our two hosts have been shattered by the battle; The wild beasts feed on the brains of men; The horses' hooves are trampling on their bones. But both of us are heroes, brave and young. ... Both noblemen of eloquence and brain; Why should slaughter be the soldier's fate? Or bare survival after the fray?' For once, legend had an excuse in history. As Porus approached, thin and remarkably tall, Alexander sent an interpreter to ask how he wished to be treated. 'Like a King', he replied, and won so much of Alexander's respect that he was reinstated as rajah and left with his kingdom intact: as Alexander advanced, seven new tribes and two thousand new cities would be added to Porus's dominions, a handsome reward for defeat. Chivalry suited the politics of balancing one Punjab rajah against another, but Indian historians have been unable to believe this intelligent generosity and still argue that if Porus received such honours, India's alleged defeat at the Jhelum can only be a western falsehood.

Victory, though resounding, did have one reservation. Alexander had gained a rajah and a new troop of elephants: he had also lost a life-long friend. In the opening skirmish with Porus's chariots, Bucephalas had been gravely wounded and within hours of the battle the old horse was reported dead; others, loyal to his invincibility, maintained that he had only collapsed of extreme old age. It was saddening news, but it could at least be honoured; Alexander had already decided to found two cities on the banks of the Jhelum, and the nearer of the two was a chance to pay his last respects. The easterly one on the battlefield he called Nicaea, City of Victory; the westerly one, near the site of Bucephalas's last river-crossing, he named Bucephala, in memory of a gallant horse. A funeral procession was organized, which Alexander led in person, and the horse's remains were presumably laid in a grave in his town; the site, soon to be damaged by floods, has never been located.

Bucephalas's fame could not be so easily washed away. In the art of Alexander's successors there recurs from Balkh to Egypt the novel theme of a horse with horns: at the eastern and western mints alike, it is to be found on the silver coins of Seleucus, his royal Successor in Asia: it also appears on a plaster plaque in the Egyptian kingdom of the Ptolemies. Now, Seleucus was to be famed for killing a bull with his bare hands, and hence it was said that his many portraits showed him wearing bull's horns: he was also to commemorate a horse which had once saved his life by a notable statue at Antioch. But these two motifs together do not wholly explain why his horse was shown homed as well, nor why the Egypt of the Ptolemies, his avowed opponents, had copied the same design. A theme which is shared by Scleucids and Ptolemies may be derived, most plausibly, from Alexander, their only common model. Bucephalas, said a late authority, 'did not as some believe, have horns of his own, but was adorned with golden horns, so they say, for battle', as the proper harness for charger whose name meant Ox-head. If true, this could be the meaning of the Successors' horned horses: they stressed their different links with Alexander but they also revived Bucephalas's memory, even on the side of their coins more usually reserved for a god. Such memories die hard. More than 250 years later, on his equestrian statue at Rome, Julius Caesar's horse was cast to suggest Bucephalas's features. A thousand years after that, the traveller Marco Polo was entertained in Balkh by stories of the rulers of Badakshan, between the Pamirs and the Oxus and close to the site of the most north-easterly Alexandria; their horses, they said, were descended from Bucephalas and so were born with a horn on their head, but jealousies in the royal family had caused the only stallion to be put to death, and so the line was now extinct. Men might never equal Alexander, but they could at least lay claim to his attributes, down to the very hooves and harness of the horse which had carried him for twenty years and died, an unforgotten hero, at the river Jhelum.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After winning the Jhelum and founding Bucephala, Alexander paid a sacrifice to the Sun. His choice of god was a symbol of his ambitions: his march was to take him eastwards, out towards the sunrise, and it would be helped by a sunny interval in the coming monsoon weather. 'In India,' a Greek had once written, safe at the Persian court, 'it never rains'; conversation with wise men and rajahs would have taught Alexander more of the truth. In the Hindu Kush he had defied the snow: his route to Siwah or Sogdia had made light of the desert. In India, when men talked of the summer rains, a sacrifice to the sun was all he felt he needed. The troops were encouraged with talk of treasure and presents of gold coin: Alexander would show them that a son of Zeus could not be deterred by the elements.

For a month, his disregard increased the danger, as he delayed in Porus's kingdom and enjoyed the supplies from the three hundred towns in its fertile country. He would have been better advised to hurry eastwards: three more rivers of the Punjab lay in his path and from mid-June onwards they would be dangerously swollen with the monsoon rains. But his mind had turned to a new and promising plan. He believed that he was near to a direct route home and when the day came to act on his belief, he would need a fleet. Men were sent up the Jhelum to the dense fir forests on the lower slopes of the Himalayas and ordered to fell timber to build ships, a familiar task to Macedonians, owners of the finest wood in the Balkans. Himalayan pine and deodar cedars, often twenty feet in girth, were a challenge to their skills of forestry; the men needed to be brave in these unfamiliar surroundings. Snakes of alarming size were seen slithering across the forest floor, and at a distance the chattering of apes was mistaken for the approach of an enemy. There were tigers, too, which the Indians said would attack an elephant, and also blue-green peacocks which so impressed Alexander that he forbade his men to kill them.

When crossing the Indus, two months before, Alexander had noticed crocodiles along the river: now, on marching east to the Chenab, third of the five Punjab rivers, he was much struck by the clumps of beans which grew on its banks. They reminded him of crops he had seen in Egypt five years ago and together with the crocodiles, they led him to a delightful theory: these upper waters of the Punjab must surely be the long-lost

source of the River Nile, as they shared its flora and fauna. The Chenab, he knew, joined the Indus: the Indus, he guessed, flowed south-west through the desert and curved round south of the Persian gulf into Upper Egypt where it changed its name to the Nile. His view of the world was compressed to fit the little he had seen of it. The Indian Ocean, the vast mass of Arabia and the Red Sea were obstacles of which he was as yet unaware and throughout his life he continued to underestimate the length of the Persian empire from north to south and the distance west from the Oxus to the Black Sea. 'Not long afterwards,' wrote his admiral Nearchus, 'he discovered his mistake about the Indus,' but when he first gave orders for ship-timber to be cut and seasoned, he was hoping eventually to explore the Indus and coast back home to Egypt and his Alexandria, having realized his aims in the east.