The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c16.80

c16.80

When the Malana cape had been passed, the inland people were known as Gedrosioi, and no longer as Oreitai.³ The inhabitants of the coast continued to astonish the voyagers by their strange manners and customs. ‘These poor wretches’, we are told, ‘had nothing but fish to live on’, and so they were dubbed Ichthyophagoi, or ‘Fish-eaters’, by the Greeks. Whales, which were numerous along this coast, although very alarming to the sailors of the fleet, were extremely useful to the natives on shore, and supplied the materials for the better houses, which were built of whales’ bones, the huge jaws serving as doorways, as they do still.⁴