For the moment, it seemed doubtful whether he would live at all. His Greek doctor from the Hippocratic school had excised the arrow, but the rumour quickly spread that Alexander was dead. Even Hephaistion and the advance camp heard it and when a letter was brought saying that he was about to come to them, they disregarded it as a fiction of the generals and bodyguard. Within a week Alexander was ready for what he knew he must do. He ordered his officers to carry him to the river Ravi and ship him downstream to the main army; the scene that followed was described by his admiral, and brings us very near to what it was like to be led by a son of Zeus.

As soon as the royal ship approached the camp where Hephaistion and the fleet were waiting, the king ordered the awning to be removed from the stem so that he would be visible to them all. However, the troops still disbelieved, saying that it was only Alexander's corpse which was being brought for burial. But then, his ship put in to the bank and he held up his hand to the crowd. They raised a shout of joy, stretching their hands to heaven or towards Alexander himself; many even shed involuntary tears at this unexpected moment. Some of his Shield Bearers began to bring him a bed on which to carry him off the ship, but he told them no, they must bring a horse. And when he was seen again, mounted on his horse, rolls of applause broke through the entire army: the banks and the nearby woods re-echoed the noise. He then approached his tent and dismounted, so that he could be seen to walk too. The men thronged round him, some trying to touch his hands, other his knees, others his clothing; other just gazed on him from nearby and said a pious word, before turning away. Some showered him with ribbons, others with all such flowers as India bore at that time of year.

'His friends were angry with him for running such a risk in front of the army; they said it befitted a soldier, not a general.' The complaint betrays them; after Alexander's death, they never commanded such devotion. An elderly Greek came forward, noticing Alexander's annoyance: 'It is a man's job,' he said in his rough accent, 'to be brave' and he added a line of Greek tragedy: 'The man of action is the debtor to suffering and pain.' Alexander approved him and took him into closer friendship. He had spoken the very motto of a Homeric Achilles.

It was as if the wound had brought king and army together, for there were no more thoughts of mutiny, only an amazed relief. As for the local Indians, the slaughter at Multan induced them to send presents of surrender and plead for their 'ancient independence which they had enjoyed since Dionysus'. Their gifts were of linen, a thousand four-horsed chariots, Indian steel, huge lions and tigers, lizard skins and tortoise shells; they sufficed for them to be added into the satrapy of north-west India, for it is a point of some importance that Alexander still intended to rule what he had conquered. After a week or two of convalescence, distinguished by a lavish banquet for the Indian petty kings on a hundred golden sofas, Alexander ordered the fleet downstream to the bend where the Punjab rivers join the lazy current of the Indus; there, no doubt from his sick bed, he gave proof of his continuing plans for the future. First, he divided the satrapy of lower India between a Macedonian and Roxane's Iranian father; then, near Sirkot, he founded an Alexandria and stocked it with 10,000 troops, telling them to build dockyards 'in the hope that the city would become great and glorious'. A little lower down the Indus he did likewise, repeating the dockyards and the city walls. Though his many damaged ships needed rapid replacement, these two naval bases were more than a response to a present emergency. They could be lasting pivots in a scheme to develop the Indus river both as a frontier and as a line of communication: ships from the yards would patrol the river, while the northern plains round Taxila and Bucephala would be comfortably within their range.

Alexander was not contented with mere dockyards. Already, he had decided to explore a new route, and so his veterans, elephants and various infantry units were now detached to march home to Susa by the regular road, settling the troubles which had recently been reported among the Iranians south-west of the Hindu Kush. The hard core of the army would accompany him, despite his wound, down to the mouth of the Indus, from where they could strike west into the desert and make for home along the shore of the Persian gulf by a land route famed for its difficulty. A sizeable fleet would skirt it at the same time in order to test out the sea passage from the Indus to the Persian coast; the army's task was secondary, to keep the fleet supplied along the shore. It was a fateful plan which now found its first expression. If fleet and army could have struggled through to Babylonia and the mouth of the Euphrates river, they would have reopened a valuable link between Asia and India.

The aim, in outline, was worthwhile, the decision to pursue it intelligent; the route, under the Roman Empire, was to be the one fragile bond between India and the western world. But the past also puts the plan into perspective, for this sea-way was a passage of astonishing antiquity. Two thousand years before Alexander, trade from the Indus valley had flowed west to the Persian Gulf bringing copper, gems, iron and perhaps the peacock into the harbours near Susa. Heir to this long history of adventure, Darius I, king of Persia, had conquered the same frontier provinces of India and sent for Scylax the Carian explorer: he had told him to investigate the Indus and sail through the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf. Scylax had already sailed on the Caspian Sea: he had also rounded the tip of Arabia until he returned to the Persian Gulf and encouraged his patron's interest in the reopening of the Pharaohs' Suez Canal. He was an enterprising man, and the Indus had caused his little boat no trouble: he had written a Greek account of his voyage and dedicated it, fables and all, to Darius. There is no reason to suppose that Alexander had read it, but he did show possible acquaintance with the local Persian precedent: the first of his Alexandras on the Indus was built on the site of an old Persian garrison, noted by Scylax and settled two hundred years before. Once again, the credit for the placing of an Alexandria belonged not to its namesake but to a long-forgotten Persian district commissioner, whose buildings provided materials for the town.

All such future developments depend on war to clear their way. Alexander's fleet had been on the river for some six months or more and spring 325 found them still a two-month journey from the ocean; they were in need of food and when they heard of a prosperous kingdom on the east bank whose king as yet had not sent envoys, they eagerly followed Alexander in a raid. Their approach was so fast that the Indians took fright and sent jewellery and elephants to buy them off, as well as an admission 'that they were in the wrong, which was the surest way with Alexander of being granted what one wanted'. Alexander admired his new conquest and left its king in command, supervised by another garrison fort:

Here, men live a long while, some of them reaching the age of a hundred and thirty . .. they even use a system of soldiers' messes, like the Spartans, where men are fed at the state's expense. They have mines, but they do not use gold or silver; they do not study much science, except for medicine; some of the other sciences, such as military theory, are considered to be a criminal practice.

This attempt to explain a Brahmin community in Greek terms was belied by what followed. While the army moved east to burn and destroy rebellious towns on the border, the Brahmin king broke his word and allowed his subjects to revolt all the more bitterly for being encouraged, not by a military handbook, but by the preaching of the Brahmin sects. Their resistance became a holy vendetta, helped by their use of poisoned arrows; and it was only ended by hanging the learned instigators and destroying all troublesome communities. Suppliants were spared in the name of the gods, but ¹over 80,000 Indians' were killed, according to the most exaggerated history, which thereby brought its total for native dead in the past six months to more than quarter of a million. The figures are not reliable, but they would have impressed, not appalled, the majority of their readers. Burning and massacring ill-equipped patriots, Alexander's style of warfare had not suddenly become more savage under the irritation of a failure and a wound; as at Thebes or Tyre or Gaza, in Swat no less than Sogdia, his treatment of rebels had never shown any mercy or given patriots reason to expect forgiveness. But to keep his men contented, he allowed them for once to plunder what they had subdued.