the interior, and also to bring dates and sheep to sell to the army.
" He himself continued his march towards the royal town of the Gedrosians, named Pura,' whither he arrived in sixty days after starting from Ora. Most of Alexander's historians assert that all the hardships his army in Asia had suffered taken together were not to be compared to the difficulties they encountered here. However, it seems that Alexander did not start on this road in ignorance of its difficulties . . ., but rather because he heard that no one had hitherto got through with an army unscathed, except Semiramis on her flight from India ; and even she, according to the reports of the natives, had only escaped with twenty men of her army ; likewise Cyrus, son of Cambyses, with only seven men."
" Cyrus also seems to have come to this wilderness to make an irruption into the country of the Hindus, but had lost the majority of his army owing to the desert and the terrible roads. Reports of such a nature excited the desire of Alexander to rival Cyrus and Semiramis, and on this account, as well as to procure from the neighbourhood necessaries for the fleet, says Nearchus, Alexander chose this route, and now the burning heat of the sun, together with want of water, had carried off a large part of the army and the baggage animals in still greater numbers ; they perished in consequence of the heat and depth of the insolated sand, but especially from thirst. For sometimes hills of deep but not closely packed sand were met with. . . . And besides the horses and mules suffered still more severely from going up and down over uneven and unstable ground. Moreover, the length of the daily marches was not the least hardship of the army. For want of water forced them to make daily marches too long for their strength."
Arrian speaks, furthermore, of the ceaseless thirst, of the want of provisions which obliged them to kill horses and mules, how the sick were left behind, how the baggage waggons were broken to pieces when it was impossible to drag them through the deep sand, and how at the beginning
1 Now Bampur or the neighbouring Pahra.
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