The kingdom beyond the Hydaspes was now Alexander's. Ordering a great fleet of rafts and boats to be built for his proposed voyage to the mouth of the Indus, he pushed on to complete the conquest of the Five Stream Land, or the Punjab--the last province of the great Persian Empire. This was India--all that was known at this time. The India of the Ganges valley was beyond the knowledge of the Western world--the Ganges itself unknown to the Persians. And Alexander saw no reason to change his mind. "The great sea surrounds the whole earth," he stoutly maintained. But when he reached the eastern limit of the Punjab and heard that beyond lay a fertile land "where the inhabitants were skilled in agriculture, where there were elephants in yet greater abundance and men were superior in stature and courage," the world stretched out before him in an unexpected direction, and he longed to explore farther, to conquer new and utterly unknown worlds! But at last his men struck. They were weary, some were wounded, some were ill; seventy days of incessant rain had taken the heart out of them. "I am not ignorant, soldiers," said Alexander to the hesitating troops, "that during the last few days the natives of this country have been spreading all sorts of rumours to work upon your fears. The Persians in this way sought to terrify you with the gates of Cilicia, with the plains of Mesopotamia, with the Tigris and Euphrates, and yet this river you crossed by a ford and that by means of a bridge. By my troth, we had long ago fled from Asia could fables have been able to scare us. We are not standing on the threshold of our enterprise, but at the very close. We have already reached the sunrise and the ocean, and unless your sloth and cowardice prevent, we shall thence return in triumph to our native land, having conquered the earth to its remotest bounds. I beseech you that ye desert not your king just at the very moment when he is approaching the limits of the inhabited world." But the soldiers, "with their heads bent earthwards," stood in silence. It was not that they _would_ not follow him beyond the sunset; they _could_ not. Their tears began to flow, sobs reached the ears of Alexander, his anger turned to pity, and he wept with his men.