The closer they kept to the coastline, the less their comfort from the Gedrosian natives. The men of Makran were inhospitable and thoroughly brutish. They allowed their nails to grow from birth to old age and they left their hair matted: their skin was scorched by the sun and they dressed in pelts of wild animals (or even of the larger fishes). They lived off the flesh of stranded whales'. They were a people still living in the Stone Age and they used their long nails instead of iron tools: the army named their neighbours the Fish-Eaters, because they caught fish in nets of palm bark and ate them raw. Their houses were built from oyster-shells and whale-bones, like Eskimos' in some warmer environment; a few sheep ranged on the edge of the sea, where the desert gives way to pebbles and salt cliffs; these were killed and eaten raw, but their flesh tasted horribly fishy. Dead fish had infected the whole district, and in the heat, which never moderates even on an autumn evening, it rotted and stank. It was as well that the army had picked the sweet nard grass which grew in the desert valleys, for they used it as bedding or roofing for their tents to dispel the smell of surrounding decay.

Other plants were less amenable. When the march began, Levantine traders who had followed the army were keenly collecting the desert spice plants among the Oreitans and around the new Alexandria and loading them on mules, sure of a market and a fortune if they could ever bring them home. But the mules had mostly died and plant-collecting was seen to be a risk, for spices were interspersed with a poisonous oleander whose juicy leaves, pointed and leathery like a laurel, caused any man or beast who ate them to foam at the mouth as if with epilepsy and die a painful death from convulsions. Mules and horses could not be allowed to graze, for there was also the danger of a prickly spurge, whose milky juice, used on poisoned arrows by pygmies, blinded any animal into whose eye it spurted. Its fruits were strewn invitingly over the ground.

Once again, it was the snakes who removed the men's last hopes of peace. They hid beneath the scrub on the hillsides and they killed every person they struck; if a man strayed far from camp, he put himself at serious risk, but the further the march went, the fewer there were who could not help straying. 'Some despaired of thirst and lay in the full sun in the middle of the road; others began to tremble and their legs and arms would jerk until they died, as if from cold or a fit of shivering. Others would desert and fall asleep and lose the convoy, usually with fatal results.' For those who survived, the unripe dates on the palm-trees proved too strong a food and many died from the sudden strain on their stomachs. To those who abandoned them they must have seemed happier dead; the stench, the sand flics, the ceaseless rise and fall of dunes which all looked the same, they ground men into the belief that they would never survive; then, near cape Ras Malan, some three hundred miles from their starting point, the native guides admitted they had lost their way. The sand-ridges carried no landmark; the sea was no longer in view. They had wandered too far inland, and they had made the last mistake they could afford.

In this crisis, they needed a man with a clear head to take charge and insist on the only calculation which could save them. How Alexander had been bearing the strain of Makran remains uncertain; there are stories of his self-sacrifice, but these probably belong on his earlier march to the Oxus, and as it was less than a year since his arrow-wound, the dust and the heat can only have exaggerated his pain. He knew that he could not be pampered and still continue to lead his troops, but he was no longer fit enough to go hungry or thirsty as an example. He did not walk, he rode; and his horses would take the worst of the discomforts. True, he did not hang back, but in the desert it pays to be the first, and when the guides announced they had lost the way, he took charge with his usual sense and authority, and led a party of horsemen away to the south of the main army until they regained the coast. It was the decision of a sound leader, for with the help of the stars the sea was one landmark they were bound to find; the ride was exhausting, but less so than waiting to die of thirst in camp. Digging in the shale by the sea's edge, his helpers found drinking water and arranged for word to be sent to the army behind; Alexander, meanwhile stayed thankfully beside the waterhole. In a crisis, scouting has its rewards.

When the rest of the army arrived, they could only agree to follow the coastline and hope for the best. They were lost and starving, and for a week, they scrambled despairingly along the shingle. But suddenly, near Gwadar, the guides began to recognize the ground which rose on their right: it was the border of the one recognized track north up the valley. If so, they were close to the borders of Makran, and the fleet's well-being could now be forgotten. Risking their last strength for survival, they struck inland and to their relief, the landscape smoothed into a milder pattern: the scrub persisted, but here and there, the ground offered grazing to a few flocks, and the guides for once had been proved right. Another two hundred miles would bring them to the local capital at Pura and from there, it was an easy stage to their agreed meeting-point with fleet and reserves near Kirman. But heavy on Alexander's mind was the knowledge that his plans for supplies had failed and that the fleet was most unlikely to have survived.

In fact, the fleet had been slow in starting. The wind had been blowing up the Indus, not down it, and the natives had returned to attack most vigorously as soon as Alexander had marched west. It was the second week in October, perhaps 13 October, before the ships could set sail and even then, they were held up for nearly five weeks at the edge of the Indian Ocean by adverse breezes from the sea; the sailors varied their rations by hunting the mussels, razor-fish and oysters of unusually large size which frequented the sea pools. When the wind tacked round in mid-November, they at last began sailing westwards in earnest, all too aware that Alexander was now near the end of his nightmarish march. Many of the flat-bottomed grain-lighters were entrusted to the open waters of the Indian Ocean in order to carry supplies which remained at Pattala and to deposit the army's food heaps along the shore; several of the fleet were triremes, or three-banked men of war, and therefore unable to house sufficient water for more than two clays' sailing, so that

they, at least, depended on Alexander's plan to dig wells. Within the first week, they put in by the river Hab to collect ten days' rations from the depot he had left them near the new Alexandria; there, they heard the news that had escaped him, the major uprising of the Oreitans and their neighbours and the death of his official satrap. But all was quiet enough for them to continue; it was apparent that the plan for supplies had broken down and that even the army ahead was starving.

As they stopped nightly and found neither stores nor promised water they too began to run short of their food-cargo. Within two weeks, they had turned arrow-shooting catapults against a crowd of Fish-Eaters and driven them back from the beach in order to steal their flocks; here, a few goats; there, a store of dates, but nowhere the heaps of com they had expected. A village was stormed for the sake of its powdered fish-meal; huts were raided in search of camels which were killed and eaten raw. There was no corn or firewood in a land encrusted with salt and sand, and the only excitement was the whales, which appeared for the first time to Greeks far out at sea, 'spouting water in such a way that the sailors were terrified and dropped the oars from their hands'. Nearchus, on native advice, replied by charging them boldly, trumpets blaring, oars splashing and sailors raising a full throated war-cry; naturally sharp of hearing, like their Arctic relations, the whales submerged in a hurry and only surfaced well behind the fleet where they continued spouting peacefully to rounds of applause from the crews. Not until two months later was a whale inspected at close quarters, when oft the coast of Persia, one was found stranded 'more than a hundred and thirty feet long, with a thick skin coated in oysters, limpets and piles of seaweed'. There was nothing here to set hunger at rest, and Nearchus, like Europeans in the Arctic, never dreamt that whales could be speared and eaten for their blubber.