his letters
detail might well deserve a better historian than my son, yet are they
of that high and honourable character, that they cannot lose any part of
their value by his familiar manner of narrating them.

When I decided upon printing these letters, it became a matter of
interest to place before the reader a short account of the countries in
which the operations of the army were conducted, as well as of the
native rulers who took part in, or were the cause of them; in order that
the letters might be more clearly understood by those friends who have
not felt sufficiently interested in the history of those countries to
make any inquiries about them. But, before I do so, I shall draw the
attention of the reader to the army of Alexander, to which I have before
alluded.

Without entering into the causes which led to his extraordinary
conquests, predicted by Daniel as the means ordained of God to overthrow
the Persian empire, then under the government of Darius, certain it is
that he conquered the whole of those countries which extend from the
Hellespont to the Indus, when his career was arrested by his own
soldiers. Having overrun Syria, Egypt, Media, and Parthia, keeping his
course to the north-east, he not only passed the Oxus, and forced his
way to the Jaxartes, but, pressed by the Scythians from its opposite
shore, he crossed that river, and beat them in a decisive battle. From
the Jaxartes he returned in a southern direction towards the Indus, and
having suffered the greatest privations, and struggled with the most
alarming difficulties during the time that he was engaged in the
conquest of those mountainous districts, he at length reached Cabool,
making himself master of Afghanistan. Here he appears to have halted for
a considerable time, to refresh and re-equip his army, which, with the
addition of 30,000 recruits, amounted to 120,000 men.

At this place, Alexander first came upon the scene of the campaign
referred to in the following letters. Here he meditated the invasion of
India, intending to march to the mouth of the Ganges; but the conquest
of that country was destined for a nation almost unknown in the days of
Alexander, and lying far more remote from it than Greece; and, until the
campaign of 1839 drew our armies to the western side of the Indus, the
Sutlej was alike the boundary of Alexander's conquests to the east, as
of those of England towards the west.

Alexander having prepared his army for this