DANGEROUS WOUND OF ALEXANDKR. 23.'i himself, and to receive their ardent congratulations, in the camp established at the point of junction between the Hydraotes (Ra- vee) and (Akesines) Chenab.* His voyage down the river, though delayed by the care of his wound, was soon resumed and prosecuted, with the same active operations by his land-force on both sides to subjugate all the Indian tribes and cities within ac- cesbible distance. At the junction of the river Akesines (Punj- nud) with the Indus, Alexander directed the foundation of a new city, with adequate docks and conveniences for ship-building, whereby he expected to command the internal navigation.^ Hav- ing no farther occasion now for so large a land-force, he sent a large portion of it, under Kraterus, westward (seemingly through the pass now called Bolan) into Karmania.^ He established an- other military and naval post at Pattala, where the Delta of the Indus divided ; and he then sailed, with a portion of his fleet, down the right arm of the river to have the first sight of the In- dian Ocean. The view of ebbing and flowing tide, of which none had had experience on the scale there exhibited, occasioned to all much astonishraent and alarm.* The fleet was now left to be conducted by the admiral Neax'- chus, from the mouth of the Indus round by the Persian Gulf to that of the Tigris : a memorable nautical enterprise in Grecian antiquity. Alexander himself (about the month of August) be- gan his march by land westward through the territories of the ' Anian, xi. 13. ^ Anian, xi. 15, 5. ' Anian, xi. 17, 6 ; Strabo, xv. p. 721.
- Arrian, xi. 18, 19; Curtius, ix. 9. He reached Pattala towards the
middle or end of July, Tzepl kvvo^ kncrolT^v (Strabo. xv. p. G92). Tlie site of Pattala has been usually looked for near the modern Tatta. But Dr. Kennedy, in his recent 'Narrative of the Campaign of the Army of the Indus in Scinde and Kabool ' (ch. v. p. 104), shows some reasons for tliinking that it must have been considerably higher up the river than Tatta; somewhere near Sehwan. '• The delta commencing about 130 miles above the sea, its northern apex would be somewhere midway between Hyderabad and Sehwan ; where local traditions still speak of ancient cities destroyed, and of greater changes having occurred than in any other part of the course of the Indus. " Tiie constant changes in the course of the Indus, however (compare p. 73 of his work), noticed by all observers, render every attempt at such identification conjectural — see Wood's Journey to the Oxus, p. 12.
