Note 57 — THE VOYAGE OF NEARKHOS.

Such a phenomenon could not of course have been observed at Malana, which is about 2 degrees north of the Tropic, and Nearkhos, as has been already noticed (Introd. p. 155), has on account mainly of this statement been represented as a mendacious writer. Schmieder and Gosselin attempt to vindicate him by suggesting that Arrian in copying his journal had either missed the meaning of this passage, or altered it to bring it into accordance with his own geographical theories. Müller, however, has a better and probably the correct explanation to offer. He thinks that the text of Nearkhos which Arrian used contained passages interpolated from Onêsikritos and writers of his stamp. The interpolations may have been inserted by the Alexandrian geographers, who, following Eratosthenes, believed that India lay between the Tropics. In support of this view it is to be noted that Arrian’s account of the shadow occurs in that part of his work where he is speaking of Malana of the Oreitai, and that Pliny (VIII. 75) gives a similar account of the shadows that fall on a mountain of a somewhat similar name in the country of that very people. His words are: In Indiae gente Oretam Mons est Maleus nomine, juxta quem umbrae aestate in Austrum, hieme in Septemtrionem jaciuntur. Now Pliny was indebted for his knowledge of Mons Maleus to Baeton, who places it however not in the country of the Oreitai but somewhere in the lower Gangetic region among the Suari and Monedes. It would thus appear that what Baeton had said of Mount Maleus was applied to Malana of the Oreitai, no doubt on account of the likeness of the two names. Add to this that the expression in the passage under consideration, for the people beyond this (Malana) are not Indians, is no doubt an interpolation into the text of the Journal, for it makes the Oreitai to be an Indian people, whereas the Journal had a little before made the Arabies to be the last people of Indian descent living in this direction.