A God in Every Stone

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Ancient Caria, including the site of Labraunda, is in present day Turkey. In 515 BC it lay at the western border of the Persian Empire; at the other end of the Empire, on the eastern border, was the settlement of Caspatyrus. The exact location of Caspatyrus has never been determined but some historians have placed it in or near Peshawar.

Fig leaves and fruit twirl in Scylax’s hands. As he turns the silver circlet round and round, animating the engravings, he imagines flexing his wrist and watching the headpiece skim down

the

sloping

desert of the mountain,

across the jewelled valley of streams and fields and fruit,

to land

splash!

in the muddied tributary along which it races towards the crocodile-filled Indus.

Beside the distant riverbank, his ship is a brown smear. His crew think him mad to have spent all night on the mountain; but why explain to them, if they don’t already understand, the wonder of waking with the sun and, in the clear morning air, looking upon the rushing course of the Indus which is laid out before him like an offering. He places the circlet on his head, runs his rough sailor’s hands over the delicate figs embossed on it — in honour of his homeland of Caria, where men are barbarians but the fruit is sweet. So the Persians say — and yet here he is, one of the barbarian men, entrusted to lead the most daring of missions in the Empire. No man has ever navigated the mighty Indus. No man has ever attempted it. Not even Odysseus.

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