Hence Cambyses did not, as the account of Herodotus represents, return to Egypt from the upper Nile without success. On the contrary, he penetrated much further than the Assyrians, and his campaign had more lasting results than the conquests of Tuthmosis III. and Ramses II. on the upper Nile. The account given by Herodotus of the distress into which the army fell, the statement that the soldiers ate each other (which is also told of the expedition of Cyrus to the Indus), and that the retreat to Egypt was thus brought about, is hardly compatible with such results and so firmly-established a supremacy. Yet we may suppose that Cambyses wished to penetrate even further than the junction of the White and Blue Nile, and there fell into difficulties. But it is probable that quite another incident lies at the base of the legend of the distress of Cambyses "in the sand." At Premnis on the Nile, Pliny mentions "the market of Cambyses;" in Ptolemy the same place is called "the Magazine of Cambyses." Strabo, when narrating the campaign which Petronius took in the year 24 B.C. against Napata, tells us, that after Petronius had taken Pselchis (140 miles above Elephantine) he came to Premnis (150 miles further up the Nile, below Abu Simbel and the falls of Wadi Halfa), "after he had marched through the sand-heaps in which the army of Cambyses was buried by a sudden wind." Thus, five hundred years after the campaign of Cambyses, the tradition was in existence, that his army had been buried there. Hence when Napata had been conquered, and the negro stems subjugated, when Mount Barkal and the falls of Wadi Halfa were already behind the army on the return journey, it was overtaken by a sand-storm in the neighbourhood of Egypt, and a part of the army, though not the whole, was buried.[170]