It would be rash to connect the heaps of bones which a traveller in our times saw in the neighbourhood of the oasis of Kasr with the destruction of the army of Cambyses,[173] and it is surprising that the Persians took the longer route from Thebes, when the shorter route which led from Memphis to Sivah was already frequented. Alexander of Macedon, in order to reach the Ammonians, marched from the Mareotic Lake along the coast westward to Paraetonium, then he turned directly to the south, and in eight marches reached the oasis. A modern traveller reached it in fifteen days from Fayum, in 1809, and the troops of Mahomet Ali who subjugated Sivah in 1820 to Egypt (2000 men and 500 camels with water) reached it in fourteen days. Most remarkable of all is the fact, that both campaigns of Cambyses were overtaken by the same disaster. The direction taken by each does not allow us to connect the two; the route to Sivah could not be past Pselchis and Premnis. Yet neither one nor the other disaster is in itself incredible, though 50,000 men cannot have perished. Some 70 years ago a caravan of about 2000 souls was buried in a sand-storm on the road from Darfur to Egypt.[174] But even if the division which was despatched against the oasis of Ammon succumbed to the storms of the desert, Cambyses maintained the oasis El Charigeh, which Herodotus calls the city Oasis and the Island of the Blessed. The magnificent remains of a temple which Darius the son of Hystaspes caused to be erected there to the god of the oasis, the ram-headed Ammon, prove that the oasis was conquered and held by Cambyses.[175]