[176] In Strabo (XV. i.) we find several references to the country of Mousikanos. These were based on information supplied by Onesikritos, who expatiates in praise of its fertility, on the virtues of its people, and the goodness of the laws and government under which they lived. It seems now generally agreed that Alôr, which was anciently and for many ages the metropolis of the rich and powerful kingdom of Upper Sindh, was the capital of Mousikanos. Its ruins were visited by M’Murdo and Lieutenant Wood, and afterwards by General Cunningham, who thus describes their site: “The ruins of Alôr are situated to the south of a gap in the low range of sandstone hills which stretches from Bhakar towards the south for about twenty miles until it is lost in a broad belt of sandhills which bound the Nâra, or old bed of the Indus, on the west. Through this gap a branch of the Indus once flowed, which protected the city on the north-west. To the north-east it was covered by a second branch of the river, which flowed nearly at right angles to the other at a distance of three miles.... In A.D. 680 the latter was probably the main stream of the Indus, which had gradually been working to the westward from its original bed in the old Nâra.” With regard to the name of the king it appears to be a territorial title, since Curtius designates the people Musicani. Lassen (Ind. Alt. ii. 176) takes this to represent the Sanskrit Mûshika (which means a mouse or a thief), and points out that a part of the Malabar coast was also called the Mûshika kingdom. Saint-Martin thinks that the Mûshika still exist in the great tribe of the Moghsis, which forms the most numerous part of the population of Kach Gandâra, a region bordering on the territories of the ancient Mûsikani (Etude, p. 162).
[177] Curtius calls the subjects of Oxykanos the Praesti, a name which would indicate that they inhabited a level country, since the Sanskrit word of which their name is a transcript—prastha—denotes a tableland or a level expanse. The name, Saint-Martin thinks, is in Justin altered to Praesidae; but Justin, it appears to me, means the Praisioi thereby. Oxykanos is called both by Strabo and Diodôros Portikanos, representing perhaps the Sanskrit Pârtha, “a prince.” It is not easy to determine where his dominions lay. They were not on the Indus, for Alexander left that river to attack them. Cunningham places them to the west of the Indus in the level country around Larkhâna, which, though now close to the Indus, was in Alexander’s time about forty miles distant from it. Their capital he identifies with Mahorta, a place about ten miles north-west from Larkhâna, where there are the remains of an ancient fortress on a huge mound, whence perhaps its name Mâhaurddha, “very high.” Lassen, on the other hand, followed by Saint-Martin, places the country of Oxykanos to the east of the river, and therefore in the vast Mesopotamia (the Prasiane of Pliny) comprised between the old or eastern arm of the Indus and the present channel (v. Lassen, Ind. Alt. ii. 177; Saint-Martin, Etude, p. 165; Cunningham, Anc. Geog. of India, pp. 259-262).
[178] See [note S], Sindimana.
[179] See [Note T], City of the Brachmans, Harmatelia; also [Note Hh], Indian Philosophers.
[180] In the 15th chapter of this book Arrian states that Alexander had sent Krateros away by this route after he had left the Sogdian capital (near Bhakar). From this we may infer that Krateros, soon after he set out on his homeward march, had been temporarily recalled by Alexander, who may have found the resistance to his arms more formidable than he had anticipated. Strabo states in one place (XV. ii. 5) that Krateros set out on his march from the Hydaspês and proceeded through the country of the Arachotoi and the Drangai into Karmania, and in another (XV. ii. 11) that he traversed Choarênê and entered Karmania simultaneously with Alexander. Now the former of these routes would have been so needlessly circuitous that it cannot be supposed it was that which Krateros selected. He no doubt marched through Choarênê (the district of Ariana nearest India), to which there was access from India through the Bolan Pass. Before rejoining Alexander he must have encountered formidable difficulties in traversing the great desert of Karman, which occupies the northern part of Karmania, and extends from thence to the confines of Yezd, Khorasân, and Seïstan. “This desert (says Bunbury) is a vast track of the most unmitigated barrenness, and a considerable portion of this interposed between the fertile districts of Murmansheer in Northern Carmania, and the Lake Zarrah in Seïstan must of necessity have been traversed by Craterus with his army. An Afghan army which invaded Persia in 1719 suffered the most dreadful hardships in this waste” (v. his Hist. of Anc. Geog. p. 522, also Droysen’s Geschichte Alexanders, p. 454, and Lassen, Ind. Alt. ii. 180).
[181] According to Aristoboulos, as cited by Strabo (XV. i. 17), the voyage down stream from Nikaia on the Hydaspês to Patala occupied ten months. “The Greeks (he says) remained at the Hydaspês while the ships were constructing, and began their voyage not many days before the setting of the Pleiades (late in the autumn of B.C. 326), and were occupied during the whole autumn, winter, and the ensuing spring and summer in sailing down the river, and arrived at Patalênê about the rising of the dog-star (towards the end of summer B.C. 325). The passage down the river lasted ten months.” According to Plutarch, Alexander spent seven months in falling down the rivers to the ocean. Sir A. Burnes ascended the Indus up to Lahore in sixty days, a distance of about 1000 miles. He estimated that a boat could drop down from Lahore to the sea in fifteen days, and from Multân in nine days.
[182] In the 41st chapter of the Periplûs of the Erythraian Sea it is said that in the regions adjoining the Indus mouths “there are preserved even to this very day memorials of the expedition of Alexander, old temples, foundations of camps, and large wells.”
[184] This was the northern channel of the Ghâra, the waters of which, some centuries after Alexander, found another channel more to the south, in the southern Ghâra which joins the main stream below Lâri Bandar.
[185] Caesar’s fleet, it is well known, suffered a similar disaster on the shores of Britain. The tides in the Indus are not felt more than sixty miles from the sea, whence Cunningham concludes that Alexander must then have reached as far as Bambhra on the Ghâra, which is about fifty miles by water from the sea. The breaking up of the monsoon, which occurs in October, is attended with high winds, intervals of calm, and violent hurricanes.