Hystaspes, and sent contingents to fight under Xerxes in Greece;
and these now Alexander claimed as Darius Codomannus's successor.
But even in these outlying regions, he found conditions very
different from those in Persia: there was no "unquestionable
superiority of the European to the Asiatic," nor nothing like.
Had he gone further, and into the real India of the Ganges
valley, his name, it is likely, would not have come down
synonymous with victory; presentlv we will call Megasthenes to
witness again as to the "unquestionable superiority of the
Asiatic to the European." But thither the Macedonians refused to
follow their king; and I suppose he wept rather over their
insubordination, than for any overwhelmment with a sense of
terrene limits. For he knew well that there was plenty more world
to conquer, could one conquer it: rich and mighty kingdoms
beyond that Thar Desert his soldiers are said to have refused to
cross. He knew, because there were many to tell him: exiled
princes and malcontents from this realm and that, each with his
plan for self-advancement, and for using the Macedonia as a
catspaw. Among them one in particular: as masterful a man as
Alexander, and a potential world-conqueror himself. He was
(probably) a more or less illegitimate scion of the House of
Nanda, then reigning in Magadha; which country, now called
Behar, had been growing at the expense of its Gangetic neighbors
for some centuries. King Suddhodana, the Buddha's father, had
reigned over the Sakyas in Nepaul as a tributary under the king
of Magadha; which statement I let pass, well aware that the
latest western scholarship has revolutionized the Sakyas into a
republic--perhaps with soviets,--and King Suddhodana himself into
a mere ward politician.

This Sandrakottos, as the Greeks called him, had many tales to
tell of the wealth of his kinsman's kingdom, and of the extreme
unpopularity of its ruler:-and therefore of the ease with which
Alexander might conquer it and hand it over to him. But two of a
trade seldom agree; both he and his host were born to rule
empires; and presently he offended susceptibilities, and had to
flee the camp. Whereupon he shortly sharked up a list of landless
reprobates, Kshatriyas at a loose end, for food and diet; and
the enterprise with a stomach in't was, as soon as Alexander's
back was turned, to drive out the Macedonian garrisons. This
done, he marched eastward as king of the Indus region, conquered