[282] Yet Pliny (vi. 17) says that though Alexander sailed on the Indus never less than 600 stadia per day, he took more than five months to complete the navigation of it! This would give the Indus a length of 12,000 miles! Aristoboulos said the navigation occupied ten months, but we may strike off a month from this estimate. The voyage began near the end of October 326 B.C. The distance from the starting-point to the sea by the course of the river is between eight and nine hundred British miles.
[283] See [Note Ee], The Sibi.
[284] See [Note Ff], The Agalassians.
[285] Curtius has here confounded the junction of the Hydaspês and Akesinês with that of the Indus and the combined stream of the Panjâb rivers. The geography of the passage is inexplicable. Arrian has given a vivid description of the confluence, but does not indicate that Alexander’s life was in danger from its perilous navigation.
[286] This rhetorical passage will remind the readers of Virgil of his description of the zones (Georg. i. 231-251): “Five zones comprise the heaven ... of which two, the frozen homes of green ice and black storms, stretch far away.... One pole is thrust down beneath the feet of murky Styx ... where eternal night, wrapped in her pall of gloom, sits brooding in unending silence.” The passage was probably, however, suggested by the lines of the sixth book of the Aeneid, 794-796: “He (Augustus Caesar) will stretch his sway beyond Garamantian and Indian. See, the land is lying outside the stars, outside the sun’s yearly path.”
[287] Racine (Alex. v. i.), imitating the present passage, says: “des déserts que le ciel refuse d’éclairer, où la nature semble elle-même expirer” (Alex. in Ind. p. 148).
[288] From which they were yet some 600 miles distant!
[289] Called the Oxydrakai by Arrian. See [Note P]. Curtius here differs from Diodôros, who says that the Syrakousai (Oxydrakai) and Malloi could not agree as to the choice of a leader, and ceased in consequence to keep the field together. Both these historians are silent as to the operations conducted by Alexander during his march from the junction of the Hydaspês and the Akesinês to the capital of the Malloi situated above the old junction of the united stream of these two rivers with the Hydraôtês.
[290] But according to Arrian, Strabo, and Plutarch, the city where Alexander was nearly wounded to death belonged to the Malloi.
[291] Thirlwall, with good reason, regards this incident as a mere embellishment of the story. “It is certain,” he says, “that even if Alexander believed in such things less than he appears to have done, he was too prudent to disclose his incredulity, and so throw away an instrument which a Greek general might so often find useful” (Hist. of Greece, vii. c. 54). The story is found in Diodôros also. If a fiction, it may have been suggested by the fact that Alexander on approaching Babylon, where he died, was warned by Chaldaean soothsayers not to enter that city. If true, Alexander had doubtless in his mind the words of Hector (Iliad, xii. 237-243), where he expresses his contempt for omens drawn from the flight of birds. Hannibal had a similar contempt, as appears from Cicero, de Div. ii.