Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c8.41

c8.41

Along this great highway Megasthenes travelled into lands never before beheld by Greek eyes. At last he came in sight of the broad stream of the sacred Ganges, and his exaggerated accounts of its size—he says it was eight or ten miles wide in places¹—testify to his wonder at beholding it. The Greeks, having no rivers of any note in their own lands, were filled with admiration at the sight of such streams as the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges or the Indus. He was struck with the fertility of the Doāb through which the road passes, with its two crops and two monsoons every year². Like Herodotus, he remarks on the hugeness of the animals—the elephants, pythons, tigers, and hunting-hounds³—and the curious plants and trees—the “reed” (really, as we have seen before, the palmyra) out of which boats could be made; the banyan with its spreading branches; the “vegetable wool” or cotton⁴, the “honey bearing reed,” or sugar-cane, and the ubiquitous rice-plant.