Journal of the Society of Arts : Volume XLIX, No. 2527 [‎695v] (16/36)

428
JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF ARTS.
[April 26, 1901.
mistaken, if indeed it has not been so mistaken
through all time. Arrian is not a good-natured
biographer. Whilst giving to his hero all
credit for his gallantry and his determination,
he never forgets to sneer at his ostentation
and an occasional display of what in modern
slang would be termed “bad form.” Other
writers than Arrian have told the story of
Alexander’s retreat, and of the disasters that
attended it, and have inferred, if not actually
stated their conviction, that where so great a
general as Alexander failed it would be hope
less for others to attempt to succeed. Arrian,
however, very clearly points out that which is
most undoubtedly true, that it was only Alex
ander’s obstinate determination to do that
which had proved so fatal to Semiramis and
Cyrus that led him to select the worst possible
route through Makran. It is impossible to
suppose that he did not know that there were
better and more open ways, even though we
may credit him with the wish to support his
fleet by adopting a route as near the coast as
possible. The high road between west and
east that lies through Makran must have been
known before Alexander’s time, just, indeed,
as we may be certain from the course which
was steered by the Mosarna pilot as soon as he
took charge of the fleet that the sea route to
Persia was well known. After Alexander’s
time many centuries elapsed before we get
another clear historic view into Makran, and
then what do we find ? A country of great and
flourishing cities, of high roads connecting
them with well-known and well-marked stages;
armies passing and repassing, and a trade
which represented to those that held it the
c'ominant commercial power in the world,
flowing steadily century after century through
that country which was fatal to Alexander,
and which we are rather apt now to consider
the fag-end of the Baluchistan wilderness.
The history of Makran is bound up with the
history of India from time immemorial. Not all
the passes of all the frontiers of India put
together have seen such traffic into the broad
plains of Hindustan as for certainly three, and
possibly for eight centuries passed through the
gateways of Makran. As one by one we can
now lay our finger on the sites of those historic
cities, and first begin faintly to measure the
importance of Makran to India ere Vasco da
Gama first claimed the honour of doubling the
Cape and opened up the ocean highway, we
can only be astonished that for four centuries
more Makran has remained a blank on the
map of the world.
DISCUSSION.
Sir George Birdwood, K.C.S.I., C.I.E., said the
story of the anabasis of “ striding Alexander ” was as
familiar to Englishmen as that of the wrath of Achilles,,
and of the wanderings of Ulysses. They were never tired
of books on the subject, and they never would be ; and
it was naturally of the deepest interest to an English
audience to listen to an exposition of the land routes
and the sea route along which he returned from India to-
Susa and Babylon by a geographer of the high
scientific ability and reputation of Sir Thomas
Holdich, who had been able to compare many sec
tions of those routes with the accounts of them by the
surveyors, and annalists who accompanied “ the youth
of Pella ” on his high emprise, as these have been so
simply, and briefly, and lucidly, and with such honesty
of purpose, compiled for us from their surviving
fragments by Arrian. Sir Thomas Holdich had,
indeed, afforded them a great intellectual pleasure,
in which he (the speaker) had himself participated
with especial zest; for during the w’ar of 1856-7 he
had twice sailed past the tranced seaboard of Persia,
and had sketched the opalescent loom line of the
coast the whole way from opposite Ras Mesandum to
the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates ; and the de
tailed landscape from Bushire andKarak to the delta,
and above the delta, to Mohammera and Bussroah,
and about Ahwaz on the Karun, the Ulai of “ the-
Book of Daniel.” It was a region of the highest
natural enchantment, where on every side sense is at
once spiritualised in vision, and history in its actual
making becomes mythology; and to have all that
rapt dreamland, trodden by Ibn Batutaand Ser Marco
Polo, and the Rabi Benjamin of Tudela, and Edrisi,
and traversed by Nearchus and Alexander, the scene
of the tragic glories of the Achaemenian Persian
Babylonian, and Assyrian Empires, and the actual
site of Paradise,—to have all this shore of the oldest
romance and human history conjured up before you
again, was indeed delightful; and the heartiest thanks
would be accorded by the meeting to Sir Thomas
Holdich for a paper which was a solid and
most attractive contribution to our knowledge of the-
historical geography of the Persian Gulf The historical term used to describe the body of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. . He had
only one adverse criticism to offer on the paper, and'
he pressed it merely to promote discussion. It was
an objection to the title. He denied that there
was anything like a “retreat,” i.e. a retirement
on his lines of communication, in Alexander’s return-
expedition from India. He did not conquer in
either the Asiatic sense of devastating countries and'
exacting tribute from them; or in the Roman sense
of subjugating and annexing them, and rigidly reor
ganising their administration; but in the Greek
sense of advancing the cause of liberty and’
civilisation, in a word, the Hellenisation of the-
world. Alexander’s great personal ambition was to-
weld the Persians and Indians and Greeks into a
united elite people, of one scientific, literary, artistic
and religious culture, if not of one actual race ; and to-