Arrian, a Greek of the second century AD, wrote this history of Alexander the Great from earlier eyewitnesses. This is Book 6 of his Anabasis of Alexander. In Book 5 the army reached India, beat Porus at the Jhelum, and then halted at the Beas; the veterans would go no farther, so Alexander turned for the long way home.

He takes them down the Indus. Among the Mallians, a people of the Punjab, he goes over a wall almost alone and takes an arrow in the lung. The army thinks him dead until they float him past to prove he lives. Then Gedrosia, the Makran desert of southern Pakistan and Iran: baggage dying, wells empty, Alexander pouring out a helmet of water rather than drink when the men cannot. Nearchus, his admiral, sails the coast with a fleet; the desert eats the land army. In Carmania they revel as if Dionysus had returned. Nearchus comes into harbor; Alexander weeps, thinking the fleet lost, then holds a feast to show they are alive. Satraps — provincial governors who thought he would not come back — are hanged.