When one approached the edge of it, his eyes became unsteady; and if he wished to go forward in the same direction, there was no place on which he could place his foot; and beneath were the waters of the river called the Indus.

He was the grandson of Chandragupta, a rude adventurer, who at one time was a refugee in the camp of Alexander the Great; and within about twenty years afterwards drove the Greeks out of India, having defeated Seleucus, the Greek ruler of the Indus provinces.

] CHAPTER XIV ~Crossing the Indus to the East~ Having stayed there till the third month of winter, Fâ-hien and the two others, proceeding southwards, crossed the Little Snowy mountains.

Proceeding from this place for three days, they again crossed the Indus, where the country on each side was low and level.

From the place where the travellers crossed the Indus to South India, and on to the Southern Sea, a distance of forty or fifty thousand li, all is level plain.

Certainly, the things that this King did were marvellous and would hardly have been undertaken by anyone else; and though his father had determined to have invaded the Lesser Asia, it is like enough that he would have contented himself with some part thereof, and not have discovered the river of Indus, as this man did.

In 327 he crossed the Indus, vanquished Porus in a pitched battle, took him prisoner, and treated him as a king.

He sailed down the Indus, in the year 326, with eight hundred vessels; having arrived at the ocean, he sent Nearchus with a fleet to run along the coasts of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf as far as the mouth of the Euphrates.

As lately as 1819 a single earthquake shock in Cutch, at the mouth of the Indus, sunk a tract of land larger than the Lake of Geneva in some places to a depth of eighteen feet, and converted it into an inland sea.

It was some time after the settlement of the Aryans on the banks of the Indus and the Ganges before the Vedas were composed by the poets, who as usual gave form to religious belief, as they did in Persia and Greece.

They could boast of their Spinozas and their Humes long before Alexander dreamed of crossing the Indus.

The great extent of the ancient Persian Empire, which reached at one period from the Danube to the Indus, exposed its whole northern frontier to the Scythian nations, as far to the east as the mountains of Imaus or Caf, now called the Belur-tag.

It is also said, that Semiramis invaded the country on the river Indus, whence the Indians derive their name, and gave battle to king Stabrobates, in which he lost a thousand ships; by which it clearly appears there were then many ships in those parts; and that the seas were much frequented.

Alexander, who flourished 324 years before Christ, travelled from Europe into Asia and Africa, passed through Armenia, Assyria, Persia, and Bactria; whence he descended by the mountains of Imaus and the vallies of Parapomissus, into India, and prepared a navy on the river Indus, with which he passed into the ocean.

He there turned by the lands of Gedrosia, Caramania, and Persia, to the great city of Babylon, leaving the command of his fleet to Onesicratus and Nearchus, who sailed through the straits of the Persian Sea and up the river Euphrates, discovering the whole coast between the Indus and that river.

The goods of India were brought up the river Indus as far as it was navigable.

All other ways being lost, by reason of the wars of the Turks, the spiceries of the Indian Islands, particularly of Java, Sumatra, and the city of Malacca, were carried up the river Ganges, in Bengal, to the city of Agra; thence they were carried by land to another city near the Indus, named Boghar, where they were discharged, because the city of Cabor, or Laor, the principal city of the Mogores, stands too far within the land.

From thence Silveira went to the city of Chatigam, or Chittigong, on one of the mouths of the Ganges, under the tropic of Cancer; for it is to be noted, that this river, and the Indus, which lies 100 leagues beyond Diu, and the river of Canton in China, all fall into the sea under one parallel of latitude.

In this same year, 1535, Nunnez d'Acunha, who was governor of India for the crown of Portugal, while building a fortress, in the city of Diu, sent a fleet, under the command of Vasquez Perez del San Paio, to the river Indus, which is under the tropic of Cancer, 90 or 100 leagues to the north- west from Diu.

The fleet came to the bar of the great river Indus in December, where the same phenomena were observed as were formerly experienced by Alexander, according to the relation of Quintus Curtius.

This is the Josephus Indus, or Joseph the Indian, under whose name there is a short voyage in Grynæus: which properly speaking is only an account of Cranganore and its inhabitants, particularly the Christians and their ceremonies, with some account of Calient, Kambaya, Guzerat, Ormuz, and Narsinga, very short and unsatisfactory.

But the case was wholly altered when British India reached from Point de Galle to the Himalayas, and spread beyond the Ganges on the east, to beyond the Indus on the west; when the policy adopted in India often influenced our dealings with European states, and when the force required for the protection of those vast interests exceeded the numbers of the royal army.

In the cylinders of Penn's 12 horse power engines, the diameter of cylinder being 21-1/2 inches, the thickness of the metal is 9/16ths: in Penn's 40 inch cylinders, the thickness is 1 inch, and in the engines of the Ripon, Pottinger, and Indus, by Messrs. Miller, Ravenhill and Co., with cylinders 76 inches diameter, the thickness of the metal is 1-11/16.

By 331 B.C. he was master of the Nile Valley, and thence turned eastward, conquering in succession the different provinces of the great empire, until before his death in 323 B.C. his empire extended from the Mediterranean to the Indus, and in the northeast far up toward central Asia.

The scenery was quite different from anything we had yet known, for now we were in the broad flat valley of Kashmir, which stretches for some eighty miles from beyond Islamabad, on the N.E., to Baramula, planted at the neck where the Jhelum River, after spreading itself abroad through the fertile plain, concentrates to pour its many waters through the mountain barrier until it joins the Indus far away in Sind.