Passage of the Hydaspes

 Passage of the Hydaspes

Eratosthenes, you’d shake your pen:
“More fables for the sons of men!”
But thunder does not lie for kings,
And rain can hide the hardest things.

Craterus waited. Meleager stayed.
The king took the keenest edge of his blade—
Companions, Scythians, Bactrian riders,
Archers, guards, and Agrianian fighters.

No drum, no torch. A silent tread
Away from the bank where Porus lay spread.
To grove and bend and island’s breast,
Where skins were stuffed and boats lay dressed.

Then broke the sky. Rain fell like spears.
Thunder swallowed the night’s small fears.
Lightning cleft the dark apart—
Yet still a whisper could set to start
A thousand oars.

At dawn the storm withdrew its hand.
The river lay cold, a sheet of iron.
The sentries blinked and did not see
The first boat slide from the island tree.

Alexander stood in the thirty-oared prow,
With trusted captains beside him now.
They landed—but the ground was wrong:
An island, not the bank they sought.

The flood had drowned the lesser way;
The ford itself had swelled astray.
Horses sank to the bridle’s foam,
And infantry waded breast-deep on.

Yet one by one they gained the shore—
Dripping, cold, but ready for war.
Horse-archers first, the guards behind,
Agrianians on the flanks aligned.

So doubt the cave, Eratosthenes.
Doubt the griffins and golden bees.
But a man who crosses twice in one dark—
By boat, by flood, by unmarked ford—
Who turns the storm into disguise,
And lands on error, yet makes it prize—

That is no eulogy. That is the bone
Of command that makes the unknown stone.
The Hydaspes saw. The rain forgot.
And Porus, far away, knew not
That the fox had already gained the strand—
Wet, but armed, and in his land.

Prose:
Alexander left Craterus and Meleager behind and marched secretly with his best troops to the hidden crossing point. There boats and skin-rafts had been prepared in advance. A violent storm broke over the river that night, and its thunder concealed the sounds of movement and embarkation. At dawn the crossing began. Alexander first landed on an island by mistake, but even the flooded channel beyond could not stop him. Men and horses forced their way through deep water and reached the far bank, where the army quickly formed for battle.