By now, some four hundred miles along the coast, interpreters and pilots had been recruited from the natives, and Nearchus would converse with them through Persian interpreters of his own. Their reports, when twice translated, caused alarm. Certain islands, they claimed, lay close to the coast of Makran and were haunted by evil spirits, whom the Greeks, reared on Homer's Odyssey, identified with the Sun and an unnamed sea nymph. Visitors to the Sun's island would vanish, while those who passed by the sea nymph would be lured to her rock, only to be turned into fish. The tale gained credit from the sudden disappearance of a warship and its Egyptian crew. The Sun, it was thought, had spirited them away, and as a metaphor, this was no doubt true. It was left to Nearchus to visit the island and refute the legend by surviving.

If the islands did not live up to their fame, it was not many days before the pilots pointed to something stranger than even they suspected. In the straits of Hormuz, where the Indian Ocean narrows against the coast of Arabia and runs into the Persian Gulf beyond, they indicated the Arabian promontory of Ras Mussendam on the starboard bow and explained that 'from this point, cinnamon and other spices were imported into Babylonia'. A new and unimagined perspective stretched far behind their words.

The report of this spice trade was true enough. It had been going on for more than a thousand years and it had already excited Alexander's curiosity. But among the spices, none was more rare or precious than this cinnamon, a plant whose natural home lies unbelievably far from the classical world. To the Greek historian Herodotus, cinnamon was a spice which grew beyond the sources of the Nile in a jungle protected by monstrous birds; the Romans, who bartered with the Arabs for as much as they could acquire, had a clearer idea of the facts behind the story, for they traced the cinnamon trade to the south-east coast of Africa and discovered that Madagascar island was involved. Rumour went further. Cinnamon, it was said, was shipped by raft across the eastern ocean on a journey which lasted five whole years, and for once, the rumours of ancient geography were justified. Cinnamon's natural home is not Arabia or even the African seaboard: it grows wild in the far-off valleys of Malaysia. In this one plant, the Greeks and Romans had reached unawares beyond their world. Once upon a time, it had been shipped across the Indian Ocean from Malaysia to Madagascar; from Madagascar, it had been attracted up the coast of Africa to Arabia and the Red Sea and so to the clientele of oriental palaces. By Alexander's day, the Arabs had naturalized it in their country, but the imports from the south's mysterious source continued; when Alexander's sailors were shown the cinnamon trade-route off Arabia, they were in contact with a product which had out-travelled their king. Cinnamon had once seen the truth which the munity on the Beas had saved Alexander from exploring. The world, it knew, went on beyond the Ganges.

For the moment, the sailors passed it by. They had been commissioned to explore the coast of the Persian Gulf and they were too short of supplies to linger over exotic reports. It was now early December and they had been on board for over ten weeks; they were hot, cramped and hungry but the wind was still propelling them, and when the end came, it came, as always, suddenly. Two days sailing into the Persian Gulf with a following breeze brought them at last to a friendly coastline: near Bander Abbas, they found com and fruit-trees and knew they would no longer starve.

'All crops were born in abundance,' wrote their admiral, 'except for olives'—the deeply revealing complaint of a Greek who finds himself far from what he knows at home. But as a few of the sailors explored inland, they soon made up for this nostalgia: they met a man in Greek clothes who accosted them in Greek. It all seemed too marvellous to be true, and the sound of their native language brought tears to their eyes: tears turned to shouts of joy when they heard the man say he was a member of the army and Alexander himself was not far distant.

Since finding the inland route when the guides had failed on the borders of Makran, Alexander had not been idle. It was now only a matter of a few days before he and his survivors would be clear of the desert, and he knew he would need food immediately. Camel riders, therefore, were ordered to gallop north, north-cast and north-west to as many provinces as they could reach, where they were to order baggage-animals and cooked food to be sent at once to the borders of Kirman. Such is the speed of a dromedary, especially over the salt waste of the Dasht-i-Kavir desert, that word even reached the satrap of Parthia near the Caspian Sea. The news caused commotion among men who had not expected to see Alexander alive, let alone returning from the ordeal of Makran. Three satraps, at least, obliged and when Alexander emerged from the desert in mid-November, he found supplies and baggage-animals waiting on the borders of Carmania. It was a sop to the repeated failures of the past eight weeks.

Kirman itself was scrubland, distinguished only for its wells and grazing and its mines of red gold, silver, bronze and yellow arsenic. Its people were not attractive and inevitably, they had been unruly, especially as Alexander had not passed that way before:

Because horses are scarce, most of the people there use donkeys even for war. The war-god is the only god they worship and they sacrifice a donkey to him too: they are an aggressive people. Nobody marries until he has cut off the head of an enemy and brought it to the King: the King then stores it in the palace, where he minces up its tongue, mixes it with flour and tastes it himself. He gives the remains to the warrior to eat with his family; the man who owns most heads is the most admired.

And yet this wretched corner of the empire had its blessings: the natives grew vines.

After sixty days in the desert, the survivors can hardly have dreamed that they would live to taste wine again. They had seen thousands die around them, perhaps half their fellow-soldiers and almost all the camp-followers. If 40,000 people had followed Alexander into the desert, only 15,ooo may have survived to see Kirman. All such figures are guesses, but there is no mistaking the men's condition. 'Not even the sum total of all the army's sufferings in Asia,' it was agreed, 'deserved to be compared with the hardships in Makran.' The survivors were broken and bewildered men who needed to assert their common identity; it was some consolation when the veterans and elephants met them on the borders of Kirman, safe and happy in their detour down the Hehnand valley, but even they brought news of unrest in the eastern satrapies. If anxiety could not be put away, it could at least be submerged in a show of relief, to nobody more welcome than to Alexander, who was racked by the growing conviction that he had launched his fleet to certain death. His close friends on the march were alive to a man, and that alone was a matter for thanks, if only by contrast with the fate of others: 'Sacrifices,' wrote Aristobulus, who saw them, 'were offered in gratitude for the victory over the Indians and for the army's survival for Makran.' There is a world of harsh experience left unsaid in those few words.

Men who have escaped from death by thirst and starvation are not so reticent about their celebrations, for when civilization is at last to hand it is hard for an explorer to respect it or to greet its petty rules. So while there were athletic games and a festival of the arts, there was, naturally, also a revel.

For seven days, they processed through Kirman; Alexander was carried slowly along by eight horses, while he feasted throughout the day and night with his Companions on a high and commanding dais, built in the shape of an oblong; dozens of wagons followed, some with canopies of purple and embroidery, others with roofs of branches kept fresh and green to shade off the sun. Inside, his friends and commanders lay garlanded and drinking wine. There was not a shield nor a helmet nor a sarissa to be seen, but all along the journey, the soldiers kept drawing wine in cups and drinking-horns and ornate bowls; as they walked or drove, they pledged a toast to one another. Pipes and flutes and stringed instruments played loudly and filled the countryside with their music; women raised the cry in honour of Dionysus and followed the procession in a route, as if the god were escorting them on their way.