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this arduous campaign, a variety of circumstances has successively 

 occurred, that unanswerably confirm whatever arguments may 

 have been previously urged concerning the grandeur and extent 

 of his views, and demonstrate, that, though the geographical know- 

 ledge which this great conqueror had of Asia was incorrect, yet 

 that he meant to have reached its most distant limits on the north 

 and east. The obstinate opposition which he met with from the 

 hardy Scythians checked his progress towards the Hyrcanian, or 

 Caspian, Sea, which he idly supposed constituted its northern boun- 

 dary; and the seditious murmurs of the soldiers prevented (at least 

 according to the Greeks) his reaching the ocean eastward. His 

 design of sailing down the Indus into the southern main was 

 formed before he had penetrated into the Panjab, and in the 

 apparent certainty of his being able to accomplish the latter ob- 

 ject, though, for the present, foiled in executing the former. He 

 intended, probably, that this vast river, rolling from the centre of 

 the Higher Asia, should waft its wealth to its southern extremity, 

 and, by the confining ocean, to Egypt itself; while a vigorous 

 commerce, flourishing along the whole line of its extent, should 

 cement a firm bond of interest and amity between the various 

 nations who inhabited the regions near its source and those who 

 cultivated its banks. The navigation of the Indus and the Persian 

 Gulph is only a counterpart of the voyage down the Nile and 

 round the coast of Egypt, where, to promote the same object, 

 he laid the foundations of that great and opulent city, which, for 

 eighteen centuries, excited the admiration and concentrated the 

 commerce of that world of which Alexander's aspiring mind had 

 planned the total subjugation. The king himself had already an- 

 nounced, and the papers found after his decease, among other still 

 more important projects, confirmed, his future intention of sailing 

 from the Persian Gulph, and coasting round Africa to the pillars 



