‘But it was clear that his glory days were over. He was facing more and more rebellion among his own men, whom he could barely control any longer, while at the same time he was getting reports that the garrisons he’d left behind in Bactria were falling apart, thousands deserting their posts. His mental health was declining badly, and he suffered from depression and mania. His last journey was down the coast into Babylon, where his chickens finally came home to roost and he died at the tender age of thirty-two. Some say he was poisoned, but it’s more likely he’d just worn himself out.’

Madison shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe if he’d never come to Afghanistan at all, if he hadn’t taken it upon himself to chase after Bessus for the sake of pride or whatever it was that drove him, things might have gone very differently. That’s what Dad believed, that it was the land itself that killed Alexander.’

‘And afterwards?’ Ben asked.

‘Oh, the Greeks hung around here for a while, but with Alexander gone they became more and more divided against each other, until after nearly two centuries of infighting they were eventually so weak that in about 145 BC they were driven out by nomadic invaders from the north, who plundered most of the booty that Alexander had brought with him from the conquest of Persia. From that point onwards, the place passed through so many different hands it’d make your head spin. The Parthian Empire of the first century BC gave way to the Buddhist Kushan Empire of the first century AD. They lasted a while before they were overthrown by the Sassanids in the third century. Then you’ve got the Kidenites, the Hephthralites, the Turk Shahi of the seventh century who brought Buddhism back, then the Hindu Shah dynasty who brought Hinduism.’

‘I could never remember all this stuff,’ Wolf said in amazed admiration. ‘How do you do it?’

Madison sipped some more beer. ‘Just a natural born genius, I guess. Or else maybe I inherited Dad’s mnemonic ability for storing all kinds of useless information.’ She went on, ‘Next, Islam appeared in the seventh century and became dominant here for a long time, until the Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan swept through during the thirteenth century and laid waste to everything in sight. The Mongol conqueror Tamerlane was in charge in the fourteenth century, then Babur in the sixteenth. And on it goes. The Hotak Dynasty, the Durrani Empire of the eighteenth century, the Barazaki Dynasty and a whole host of temporary rulers, tribal warlords setting themselves up as emirs and governors.’

‘And in the middle of all that, the British came,’ Ben said.