Then in the morning the Elder woke him from sleep, and led him before the bare tree, and bade him ask of it what he would, and he knelt before it and kissed it, and asked in his mind, “Who is it that shall harm my mother or sisters or myself?” Then he had this answer from the tree: “O mighty lord, if I should tell thee the man who should betray thee it were easy for thee to slay him and to overcome thy fate, and the oracles would be made of none effect. Therefore thou shalt die at Babylon, not by iron, as thou deemest, nor by gold, silver, nor by any vile metal, but by poison. Thy mother shall die by the vilest death, and shall lie unburied in the common way, to be eaten by birds and dogs. Thy sisters shall live long and happy lives. Short as thy life shall be, thou shalt be lord of all lands. Now ask no more, but return to thy army and to Porus thy friend.” And the Elder came up to him and said: “Let us depart with speed, for the weeping and moaning of thy companions have offended the holy ones of the trees,” and Alexander and his companions departed from the forest. Then he asked the Elder who was the god of the palace, and he told the King it was Bacchus, who had sent him to the temple at the Parting of the Ways, and who had welcomed him in the palace. So Alexander came to his peers, and with them went down the golden stairway and joined the host, and hurried on day after day until he came to the Parting of the Ways, and there he found his army under the command of Porus his friend.
And after the army was gathered together, Alexander the King spoke of his journey to the oracles, and how he had climbed the stairway, and how he had been guided by the god, and had asked the trees of his fate, and he told them that the trees had promised him that he should conquer the world, and return to Macedon, and live a long life, and all the army shouted with joy. But the comrades of Alexander and his twelve peers were sad, for they knew what was foretold, yet they said not a word of it, but shouted with the rest. Then Porus the Indian doubted of the truth, and he questioned the king’s companions closely, but they told him not of the oracle: howbeit he was assured in his heart that Alexander was to die, and he thought to seize on the empire, and he began to contrive the king’s death; and Alexander knew of his questionings, and kept watch over his doings.