‘Nothing changes,’ Madison replied. ‘History just goes around in cycles. All you have to do is fill in the blanks. So in he marched with his gigantic invasion force, and promptly started conquering everything he could find and claiming it as his own. Centuries later when the British, Russians and then the Americans each in turn seized Kandahar, they were capturing a city founded by Alexander himself on his newfound territory. Its name comes from the Arabic for his own, “Iskandariya”. Alexander saw it as a strategic point guarding important trade routes to the Indus Valley in the south and Kabul in the north. Now his appetite was whetted to take over the entire land. He arrived in Bagram and founded another city there, which again he named after himself: “Alexandria on the Caucasus”. Its site sat undiscovered for centuries.’

‘Did your dad find it?’ Ben asked.

‘I wish,’ Madison said. ‘No, it was discovered a little before his time, in 1833 by a British explorer called Charles Masson. Nowadays there’s nothing much left of it, what remains mostly buried under the old US air base. Alexander used it as a staging point to go off conquering more territory, while still chasing after Bessus. Over the next few months he marched his army fifteen thousand miles all across and around the southern half of Afghanistan.’

‘Can’t have been a walk in the park,’ Wolf said.

‘That would be an understatement. In summer the army suffered from crippling heat and thirst and faced plagues of mosquitoes and flies. In winter they were hit by terrible snowstorms and ran dangerously low on provisions. You can imagine the logistical problems of keeping such a massive force supplied, consuming 255 tons of food and 150,000 gallons of water every single day. Meanwhile Bessus and his followers were waging guerrilla warfare on them, attacking Alexander’s supply lines to make life even harder.’

‘But I’m guessing that didn’t put Alexander off,’ Ben said.

‘Not him, not a chance. He kept on after Bessus relentlessly, marching the army across deserts where hundreds of men died of thirst, and over the mountains and through the Khawak Pass where blizzards froze hundreds more to death. When the food ran out completely, the soldiers had to eat their own baggage animals, just like the starving British invasion force of the 1800s were forced to do. The land itself was killing them, far more effectively than their enemies could.’

‘This place is a bitch, all right,’ Wolf said. ‘We can all attest to that.’

‘Next they had to cross the Oxus River, a five-day operation made more difficult by the fact that Bessus’s forces had pre-emptively burned all the boats in the region. But Bessus didn’t manage to keep running for much longer. Eventually he was betrayed and brought in front of Alexander, who in his typically compassionate way had him tortured, his face hacked off, then his body torn apart between two bent trees.’