Alexander the Great

by Robin Lane Fox

  It was not that Alexander was ignorant of the difficulties of the journey, but he had heard that nobody yet who had passed that way had come through safely with an army; Queen Semiramis, on her return from India, had only brought back twenty survivors, King Cyrus a mere seven. These rumours inspired Alexander with a wish to rival Cyrus and Semiramis: at the same time, he wished to be near to his fleet and keep it supplied with what it needed.

  The desert tribes had sent envoys to surrender five years earlier and the difficulties of their land were indeed familiar. But no known legend already linked Semiramis, heroic queen of Babylon, with such a desert march. Her only local memorial was the 'hill of Semiramis' at the far end of the journey, where Alexander and Nearchus remet. By then the troops had suffered appallingly and any excuse was welcome. Semiramis's name greeted the survivors, so she could be said, for solace, to have gone through the desert too; 'only twenty', said the officers, had managed it, whereas Alexander had 'saved' thousands. Bagoas and other Persians could add a similar story of Cyrus. When he set out, neither precedent was needed nor suggested by the landscape. The adventure's difficulties attracted him and his men, as always. Mishaps of other kings were only invented at the end. But it was the fleet which kept him down on his fateful route.

  As he founded another Alexandria on the river Maxates, site of one of the old trading towns on the Bcluchistan desert, there were two available lines of advance to the west. Like Tamurlane or Babur after him, he could keep away from the shore of the Persian Gulf and head north-west where the river Porali waters the fertile Welpat pocket; he would reach the site of modem Bela, from where a rough road skirts the southern coastal hills and runs due west to Kirman through a countryside of cliff and sand, made tolerable by drifts of dates and grain-fields. A safe passage here would be rivalry enough of the legendary feats of Cyrus and Semiramis, but throughout, he would be blocked from the shore by a chain of mountains, and at a distance of a hundred miles, he could not liaise with the fleet or dig wells for its convenience. Hence he must have begun by intending to take the road to the south of the hills and seldom stray more than twenty miles from the sea until he reached Gwadar. His plan, after all, depended on linking the fleet and the army; the Gcdrosians, people of Makran, had sent word of their surrender as far back as autumn 330, so resistance, at worst, would be tribal.

  The plan itself was eminently worthwhile. Supported by land, the fleet would sail westwards from the Indus to the Persian Gulf and thence to the coast of Babylonia; a waterway was to the ancient world what a railway, relatively, was to nineteenth-century Europe, and if Alexander's fleet succeeded in its navigation, it would have reopened the fastest available route between Asia and India. Not that its speed would ever be predictable. With a following wind, the journey westwards took at least six weeks: a return to India would only be possible in spring, when the trade monsoon changed direction. But if its value for messages and strategy was limited, as a trade route it had risks and possibilities for the patient sailor. In India, Alexander had discovered luxuries and raw materials which the courts of Asia would gladly put to use, and throughout history it is luxuries which have driven merchants down their most spectacular 388 routes. His prospectors had found gold and silver and mounds of salt; his troops had picked stones as precious as jasper and onyx from the rivers they had been asked to cross. There was ivory, horn, muslin and bales of cotton ready for the picking; Indian dogs and elephants were valuable cargo. Above all, there were the spices, the nards and cassia, cardamom, balsam and myrrh, sweet rush, resinous bdellium, and the putchuk which grew in the Punjab and the Indus delta.

  The list of spices known to the Greeks after Alexander's death was five times more varied than before. For medicines and cooking, scents, fumigants and soaps, a wide range of spices was a rich man's delight, and though trade between India and Asia would be a hazardous and slow business, better left to foreign entrepreneurs, in spices alone there were imports enough to give it appeal. So much the cheaper if they could come by sea; only a priceless luxury has the value to reward a trader who runs such a risk over such a distance.

  To this end, Alexander's plans were ambitious: he requested his admirals to keep close to the coastline and inspect every likely harbour, water-supply or stretch of fertile land; he had hopes of colonizing the shore and easing the journey for future sailors, but even here he had been anticipated; exploration of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf was not the new idea that it seemed. For the past two thousand years, traders had been sailing west to Babylon from the Indian Ocean and towns had once flourished on the coastal rivers of Makran; the Persian kings had inherited the tradition and two hundred years before Alexander, Darius I had settled Greek and Carian sailors at the mouth of the Euphrates to expedite the naval routes which met there from the east. When the grand Persian palace was built at Susa, sissoo-wood had been shipped from the Punjab for its pillars, down the very sea route which Alexander now planned to investigate. As at the Indus, he was unaware that Scylax the sea captain had sailed two hundred years before and proved the truth of a long used tradeway to his enterprising Persian patron.

  For the sake of an ancient sea route, therefore, he chose to march close to the shore. According to his admiral, 'he was not ignorant of the difficulty of the route'. Five years before, he had received ambassadors from the Gedrosians, men of Makran, who promised surrender, but this understatement leaves the extent of his knowledge unclear. By marching by this southern road he was attempting the most abominable route in all Asia. No comparable army has ever tried it since and its few explorers have suffered so bitterly that they have doubted whether Alexander could ever have preceded them unless the Makran desert had been friendlier in his day than theirs. But his intended coastal march cannot be argued away. As for the desert, even though it had supported towns on its coastal rivers two thousand years before, geology suggests that it had never been mild. His officers described it as 'less fiery than India's heat' but they could give no such credit to its sand dunes or its sterility. 'Alexander was not ignorant of the difficulty. ...' The march through Makran can only by understood by an explorer, for in the same mood, men have tried to climb the steepest face of Everest at the wrong season of the year or to conquer the North Pole in the inadequate care of a hot air balloon. There is a streak in man which drives him to dare what others have not thought possible, and Alexander had never believed in impossibilities anyway. Makran was the ambition of men who wished to set a record and had nothing left to conquer but a landscape which Persia had left alone. The route was not merely difficult; it was the most hellish march that Alexander could possibly have chosen. But nobody opposed it.

  There are hints that he knew this more or less to be so. Some two months before, when approaching Pattala down the Indus, he had already detached all the Macedonian veterans whom he meant to discharge, probably some ten thousand in number, and had sent them together with two brigades of mercenaries and all the elephants west towards the foot of the Hindu Kush, from where they could follow the gentle lushness of the Helmand valley and reach the centre of the Empire without being troubled by desert. The Makran journey, therefore, was known to be a severe test, but for the rest of the army, there were consolations which may perhaps show local knowledge. They had been busied between Pattala and Karachi until early August; they would not toil over the sand-dunes of Makran until September, by which time the brief but regular rains could fairly be expected to fall in the hills and run down towards the coast. If Makran has a favourable season, it is perhaps late autumn; its coastline, for example, is a prolific home of the sweet-scented calotrope (Calolropis procera), which sheds its highly poisonous seeds from June to early September. The hot summer wind blows them into the face of summer travellers, who have suffered accordingly; by entering Makran in mid-September, Alexander would at least avoid disheartening wind and poison.

  Supplies, however, are the proper point at which to assess his precautions, for they do not merely depend on Alexander's compe
tence or otherwise, a topic which different fashions like to approach differently, however slender the facts. They also depend on his staff. For while the results must not be played down or excused, the march through Makran had been agreed and discussed by the same staff-officers who had transported more tlian 100,000 men down the Indus and equipped an army as far as the Beas. The troops had indeed gone hungry in the past, but that was one more reason for anticipating their needs in future. Makran was known to be a difficult desert, and yet the officers were confident that Alexander would bring them through; it is unthinkable that he had won this confidence without first explaining the sources of food. Had he tried to browbeat them by nothing more than talk of the mishaps of Cyrus and Semiramis and the challenge of difficult exploration, they would have been justified in deserting or poisoning a leader who had clearly lost his sense of the possible. They did neither, and in fact, there is proof that the march had been carefully considered. The region round Pattala was rich in grain and cattle and a huge heap of corn had been plundered: 'four months' supplies for the expedition' had been duly gathered near the base camp before the men set out for the river Hab, and four months, was the likely length of the desert march, through the country of the Oreitans and Gedrosians.

  The fate of these stores at Pattala is most mysterious. Wagons and pack-animals did follow the land army into the desert, together with children, women and traders. Clearly, Alexander was not aware of the full horror of Makran, and hoped that a part of the stores could be moved through its sand by pack and cart.

  But he cannot have planned to convoy more than a small part of his store-heap in the army's train. Its volume was far too large, so the usual strategy would apply as in the years on the Mediterranean coast. The army's stores would be loaded into the huge grain-lighters which would thus supply the whole expedition from the sea. The histories imply only that Alexander was concerned to supply the fleet with water. There is no clear word of his own dependence on the ships. This may be a concealment of a plan which failed, or it may be one more example of their concentration on Alexander's own role. For the link with the fleet was surely planned to save Alexander, and for once his famous luck deserted him.

  First, the monsoon winds blew up the Indus until mid October and detained the fleet for three months, stores and all. Alexander had not allowed for the seasonal weather. Then, the tribesmen struck a blow. Before entering Makran, Alexander had left several thousand troops, a Bodyguard and a satrap to round off the conquest of the Oreitans and to settle the new Alexandria on the old river-site; the satrap is said to have been given other firm orders, and they are easily deduced from the sequel. When the fleet finally reached the first depot in his territory, they took on ten days' supplies. Plainly, the satrap was to be Alexander's link with the fleet. He had been ordered to fill up its stores, direct it to suit the army's timing and detail its meeting-points with Alexander. These would have been specified from the Oreitans’ local knowledge. But when Alexander marched west, the Oreitans round the new Alexandria united with their neighbours and harassed both the satrap and the fleet way back on the Indus. Perhaps they burnt a part of the store-heap. Certainly, they killed the satrap in a major battle. Meanwhile Alexander was far into Makran and daily despairing of contact with his fleet and his main supplies. It never occurred to him to blame their absence on a continuing wind. He could only think that his satrap had betrayed his orders, so he sent orders for his deposition as soon as the army had struggled out of the desert. He did not know that the man had died, still less that he had blamed a wrong, though plausible, culprit.

  Alexander was leading a land army which was large, if not excessive: about half the Foot Companions and three-quarters of the Shield Bearers, many of them over sixty years old, had been sent home by the easier route, but his expedition still numbered some 30,000 fighting men, 8,000 of them Macedonians, though accuracy is impossible as the number of ships and sailors detached with the fleet is unknown. They might just have been fed sufficiently, had the satrap of the Oreitans in the rear fulfilled his orders and had Makran been no more fearsome than the desert which led to Siwah. But the fleet delayed, and the march through Makran was so indescribably unpleasant that neither of the two officers, who very probably had been through it could bring themselves to give a history which went beyond the sweeter-smelling kinds of desert flower and a trivial outline of anecdotes.

  It was left to Nearchus, following by sea, to describe what the land troops had really suffered; he would have heard it plainly enough from Alexander and his officers when they eventually re-met. The beginning among the Oreitans was as nothing to the trials which followed; in Makran, land of the Gcdrosians, their surroundings were hot, barren and hopeless. The men would only move by night, though even then the temperature would not have dropped below 350 C, and as the true nature of the desert became apparent, they would be forced across twelve or even fifteen miles at a stage. On solid gravel they had shown they could do it but Makran is not solid; it is a yielding morass of fine sand, blown into dunes and valleys, like waves on a turbulent sea.

  In places, the dunes were so high that one had to climb steeply up and down quite apart from the difficulty of lifting one's legs out of the pit-like depths of the sand; when camp was pitched, it was kept often as much as a mile and a half away from any watering-places, to save men plunging in to satisfy their thirst. Many would throw themselves in, still wearing their armour, and drink like fish underwater: then, as they swelled they would float up to the surface, having breathed their last, and they would foul the small expanse of available water.

  The expected summer rains, which would run down from the mountains and fill the rivers and the water-holes and soak the plains' had not yet fallen along the coast; that was bad luck, but to crown it all, when the rains came, they fell out of sight in the hills and found the army bivouacked beneath near a small stream. Shortly before midnight, the stream began to swell with the spate of fresh water which was coursing down from its source in a flash-flood. 'It drowned most of the women and children who were still following the expedition and it swept away the entire royal equipment, including the remaining pack-animals. The men themselves only just managed to survive and even then, they lost many of their weapons.'

  Hunger increased with despair. As long as the pack-animals survived, they could be slaughtered unofficially and eaten raw by the troops; many died of the drought or sunk into the sand 'as if into mud or untrodden snow', and these were fair game even for the officers. Dates and palm-tree hearts were available for those who were of a rank to sequester them, while sheep and ground flour were seized from the natives: it was the custom in Makran, in years when the harvest ripened without scorching, to store enough to last for the next three seasons. When the fleet first failed to join the army, Alexander had gambled. He had marched on by the most plausible route, eventually turning inland in desperation. Yet as soon as he found supplies he showed his greatness. Reasoning that the fleet, by now, must be starving too, he ordered part to be taken to the coast. This would signal the army's new route. As usual, he did not put himself first when marching. Not so his men, who ate the supplies when entrusted with their convoy to the coast.

  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 in
fected 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.