urprised Porus by landing on the other side. In their strange
wanderings the Greeks had fought under varying conditions, but they
had never faced elephants before. Nevertheless, they brilliantly
repulsed an onslaught of these animals, who slowly retreated, "facing
the foe, like ships backing water, and merely uttering a shrill, piping
sound." Despite the elephants the old story was repeated, civilised
arms triumphed over barbarians, and the army of Porus was annihilated,
his chariots shattered, and thirty-three thousand men slain.

The kingdom beyond the Hydaspes was now Alexander's. Ordering a great
fleet of rafts and boats to be built for his proposed voyage to the
mouth of the Indus, he pushed on to complete the conquest of the Five
Stream Land, or the Punjab--the last province of the great Persian
Empire. This was India--all that was known at this time. The India
of the Ganges valley was beyond the knowledge of the Western world--the
Ganges itself unknown to the Persians. And Alexander saw no reason
to change his mind.

"The great sea surrounds the whole earth," he stoutly maintained.

But when he reached the eastern limit of the Punjab and heard that
beyond lay a fertile land "where the inhabitants were skilled in
agriculture, where there were elephants in yet greater abundance and
men were superior in stature and courage," the world stretched out
before him in an unexpected direction, and he longed to explore farther,
to conquer new and utterly unknown worlds!

But at last his men struck. They were weary, some were wounded, some
were ill; seventy days of incessant rain had taken the heart out of
them.

"I am not ignorant, soldiers," said Alexander to the hesitating troops,
"that during the last few days the natives of this country have been
spreading all sorts of rumours to work upon your fears. The Persians
in this way sought to terrify you with the gates of Cilicia, with the
plains of Mesopotamia, with the Tigris and Euphrates, and yet this
river you crossed by a ford and that by means of a bridge. By my troth,
we had long ago fled from Asia could fables have been able to scare
us. We are not standing on the threshold of our enterprise, but at
the very close. We have already reached the sunrise and the ocean,
and unless your sloth and cowardice prevent, we shall thence return
in triumph to our native land, having conquered the earth to its
remotest bounds. I beseech you that ye desert not your king just at