Nearchus would, no doubt, have accomplished the task allotted to him by Alexander, but when the expedition was ready to start, the Macedonian conqueror lay on his death-bed. In the midst of the fever of which he died, he, according to the diary of one of his officers, “transacted business with his officers, and gave directions about the fleet.”[274] On the following day, though “the fever now ran very high, and oppressed him much, he nevertheless ordered the principal officers to attend, and repeated his orders in regard to the fleet”; and on the day of his death, when unable to speak, it would appear by the diary preserved in the extracts made from it by Arrian, that his last thoughts were directed to the conquest and colonization of Arabia. His untimely death, however, not only put an end to this project, but also to all his other splendid schemes. As is well known, the body of Alexander was hardly cold, ere the great empire he had founded fell to pieces, and was parcelled out among those who had been his ablest lieutenants; but, though for a while suffering from the rude conflict of rival selfishness, it is a remarkable fact that the commercial relations between the different provinces he had overrun had been so well established by the sagacity of the conqueror, that on the final restoration of tranquillity, the Macedonian dominion, and with it Greek principles of trade and mutual intercourse, prevailed throughout Asia, no province succeeding for many years in shaking off the yoke. Even in the distant East, though those portions of it subdued by Alexander for a while joined a native chief Sandracottus (Chandra-gupta), the ruler of a powerful nation on the banks of the Ganges, whose plan was to attack those parts of the Macedonian dominions bordering on his territories, order was soon restored; while Alexander’s immediate successor in the government of the East, Seleucus, who had carefully studied the principles of his great master, conceived so clear an idea of the importance of a commercial intercourse with India, that he marched into that country, and, entering into relations with Ptolemy the son of Lagos, established on a firm basis the trade between the Red Sea and Hindustan, as described in the previous chapter. [Sidenote: Eastern India.]