BOOK VI.
CHAPTER I.
Preparations for a Voyage down the Indus.
Alexander now resolved to sail down the Hydaspes to the Great Sea, after he had prepared on the banks of that river many thirty-oared galleys and others with one and a half bank of oars, as well as a number of vessels for conveying horses, and all the other things requisite for the easy conveyance of an army on a river. At first he thought he had discovered the origin of the Nile, when he saw crocodiles in the river Indus, which he had seen in no other river except the Nile,[1] as well as beans growing near the banks of the Acesines of the same kind as those which the Egyptian land produces.[2] This conjecture was confirmed when he heard that the Acesines falls into the Indus. He thought the Nile rises somewhere or other in India, and after flowing through an extensive tract of desert country loses the name of Indus there; but afterwards when it begins to flow again through the inhabited land, it is called Nile both by the Aethiopians of that district and by the Egyptians, and
- ↑ Herodotus (iv. 44) says that the Indus is the only river besides the Nile which produces crocodiles. He does not seem to have known the Ganges.
- ↑ This was the Nelumbium speciosum, the Egyptian bean of Pythagoras the Lotus of the Hindus, held sacred by them. It is cultivated and highly valued in China, where it is eaten. The seeds are the shape and size of acorns.
