Some ran to the gates, and opened them, and the anxious soldiers poured in and took the citadel. They believed that their king was dead, and they wreaked their fury on the miserable inhabitants, leaving neither men, women nor children alive. Alexander was not dead, and although his wound was severe, he recovered. But the rumour of his death had reached the camp near the river where the main body of the army had been left. No letters, no messages could make the grief-stricken soldiers believe that their king still lived. Alexander was brought down the river in a ship. He was lying on a couch in the stern of the vessel as he drew near to the camp, and he ordered the canopy which screened him to be raised that his soldiers might see him. At first they thought it was but his lifeless body which they beheld, but as he drew nearer still, the king waved his hand. Then a great shout of joy rent the air. CHAPTER CII THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER In the autumn of 325 B.C. Alexander began to march through the desert of Gedrosia on his way to Babylon. The heat was terrible, and the soldiers were soon parched with thirst, while sinking sand added to the hardship of the march. Alexander tramped by the side of his men across the dreary waste, sharing all their privations and cheering them by his presence. But before he left the desert of Gedrosia, the king had lost more than a fourth part of the army that had set out with him from India two short months before. At length the exhausted soldiers reached Susa, and here the king allowed them to rest. He himself found much to do, for many of the satraps whom he had left in charge of different provinces had betrayed their trust. They had treated cruelly those who were in their power, and had formed plots to make themselves kings over their own provinces. It may be that they thought Alexander would never come back from his perilous journey in the East. When he had punished those who had proved faithless, were they Macedonians or Persians, he turned to a matter on which his heart was set--the union of the peoples of the East and the West. The king tried to accomplish this in different ways. He had already built cities in the East, and left in them Greeks and Macedonians along with the native Asiatics. Now he himself wedded Statira, the daughter of Darius, Hephæstion married her sister, while several Macedonian generals, following the example of the king, took the daughters of Persian nobles to be their wives. Many of the soldiers, too, married women of the East. Alexander hoped that little by little the two races would learn to know each other better and to have the same interests.