It was mid-July before the end of the river journey was in sight. The army was bivouacked near Pattala in the last of the petty kingdoms rich enough to keep them supplied; the natives had mostly run away and while they fortified villages and dug wells for water in the shale that edged the desert, Alexander arranged a wall for Pattala's citadel and another dockyard at the head of the Indus's estuary. The result, called the Wooden City, was built from timber, the only material to hand. When the work was to his satisfaction, he embarked with his friends on the swiftest ships and set the course for the nearby ocean. For a wounded man, the risk was considerable, as the natives had fled and there were no local pilots to be recruited. Alexander knew that he had to show the way, before asking his ships to follow: he had his reasons, but once again in the absence of local knowledge they were to be frustrated by the rise of the July monsoon.

The officers had grown accustomed to the summer heat of the great Thar desert which stretches east along the Indus's far bank. They were to describe it accurately in their histories and they had even observed the shrimps and smaller fishes in the river itself. But they had not been expecting wind and rain. No sooner had Alexander launched into the delta than a storm sank many of his stoutest ships, and although during the repairs, guides were at last captured from the nearby tribesmen, even their skill could not avoid the weather. Where the delta widened, the wind blew so strongly from the sea that the rowers missed, their stroke and were forced to shelter in a backwater. After lying at anchor, they found they were high and dry: for the first time, Alexander's sailors had met a tide 'and it caused them considerable consternation, especially when the ebb-current changed in due course and the ships were floating back on the river'. Among Macedonian crews, this novelty led to more damage, and it was with a certain caution that Alexander sent out two of his heaviest flat-bottomed transports to inspect any further dangers before he advanced. They reported that an island stood conveniently in mid-stream; Alexander followed with a few of his bravest captains, until at last, the dash of the waves was heard against the royal trireme. He had reached the outer ocean, but it was not the Eastern Sea at which he had once aimed.

Success emboldened the crews. First Alexander 'offered sacrifice on the island at the river mouth to those gods which, he said, had been told him by Amnion'; on the following day he sailed to a further island and offered different sacrifices to different gods; 'these too were made in accordance with Amnion's prophecy'. Then, venturing right out on to the deep, 'he slaughtered bulls to the sea-god Poseidon and cast them into the sea; he poured libations, and threw their golden cup and golden bowls out into the waves'. On returning up river to his base camp, he searched out a westerly arm of the Indus estuary and explored it too, finding it more navigable because of the shelter of an inland lake. There, instead of sacrifices, he left plans for a boat-house and a garrison.

These sacrifices were not the thanksgivings of a romantic explorer; the outer ocean was only visited for a purpose, And Alexander had long revealed what this was to be. While the army marched west along the shoreline, the ships were to leave the mouth of the Indus, turn through the Indian Ocean and enter the Persian Gulf with the monsoon wind behind them; to a newly assembled fleet, the prospect was terrifying, and so Alexander had gone down to the ocean and made it his business to test the first stage in person with a proper show of piety. Only one gap remained in his plans: he himself would march by land, and he needed an officer to lead the naval expedition. Thinking through his friends, he chose, most happily, a Cretan who would also write a history.

'Alexander,' wrote Nearchus the Cretan, long domiciled in Macedonia and throughout his life a friend,

longed passionately to sail the sea from India to Persia but he was fearful of the length of the voyage and of the possibility that the expedition might meet with a bare stretch of country or fail to find anchorage or run short of supplies and so be completely destroyed. If so, this would be no mean blot on his past achievements and would efface his entire good fortune. But even so, his desire to do something that was always new or strange triumphed over his fears.

Only an explorer can understand the power of these feelings: Alexander discussed with Nearchus the possible choices of admiral 'but', wrote his friend, choosing his words artfully, 'as one after another was mentioned, Alexander raised an objection to them all; some, he said, were not tough enough, others were not willing to take a risk for him; others were longing for home'. And so the way was prepared for Nearchus: 'My lord,' he said, 'I am prepared to lead your expedition and may heaven help the enterprise.' Alexander demurred, 'unwilling to risk one of his own friends in such distress and danger'. Nearchus begged and besought him and at last was allowed to go.

The choice was perhaps less dramatic than its hero implied in his memoirs; Nearchus had been leading the fleet for the past ten months. The preparations, too, were awkward. Many of the triremes were waterlogged or in poor repair and as for the finances, the most mysterious aspect of Alexander's career, for once they are known to have been an added anxiety. The king's travelling treasury was empty, money to hire guides and buy supplies could only be raised by a levy among his friends. The decision was unpopular and several tried to evade it, not least of them Eumenes the royal secretary who is said to have refused two-thirds of his quota until Alexander ordered his tent to be set on fire to flush his true wealth into the open. Once obeyed, the levy did indeed force the officers to show concern for the preliminaries: 'The splendour of the equipment, the smartness of the ships and the patrons' conspicuous concern for the staff-officers and the crews encouraged even those who, a short while before, had been nervous about the undertaking.'

So it was that Alexander had defied the winds, his wound and the lack of pilots, in order to venture on to the outer ocean. 'What greatly contributed to the sailors' enthusiasm was the fact that Alexander had sailed down each of the mouths of the Indus in person and paid sacrifice to the gods of the sea. They had always believed in Alexander's extraordinary good fortune and now, they felt there was nothing that he would not risk and still achieve.' Hence, the trip to the ocean, for a wound in the lung had not altered Alexander's attitude to leading his men. But the next three months of marching were to alter the men's belief in their leader's fortune and infallibility.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The new expedition was to prove the most unpleasant in Alexander's career. It is also the most puzzling. Posterity has decked him out with many different virtues, each to suit its varying tastes; none has been more widespread or persistent than the idea of his invincibility. It set a pattern for Roman emperors; it kept its appeal a hundred and fifty years after his death for the kings and settlers in the Alexandras of upper Iran. The last three months of 325 should have given the lie to the legend. Alexander the Invincible was to suffer an extremely grave defeat; worse, he seems at first sight to have invited it. To many this is so unthinkable that his route and his aims have been believed, against the facts, to have lain elsewhere, and even the landscape has been argued away to save his reputation.

While the fleet was detained by adverse winds at the mouth of the Indus, the land army set out through the barren and sandy plains which stretch to the north-west of modem Karachi. It was late August and water was in very short supply, but by the river Hab the Oreitan tribesmen, 'for long an independent people', were driven back in a skirmish. No quarter was shown; and near lake Siranda, the troops could briefly satisfy their thirst. They had already matched 150 miles in a temperature of more than ioo° F and many were suffering from a skin irritation caused by the sand; they were still burning and slaughtering all local resistance, but they showed no signs of flinching from the task before them. The king's ambitions, therefore, deserve to be closely considered.