Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Robin Fox

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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 competence 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 35 ⁰C, 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 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.

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.

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