Within a week, by 26 March, the whole army had crossed the Ganges by the bridge of boats and was now heading in the direction of the much-contested city of Patna: ‘The army proved so very numerous that as far as the eye could see it covered the country and plains, like an inundation, and moved like the billows of the sea,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan. ‘It was not an army but a whole city in motion, and you could have found in it whatever could be had in former times in Shahjahanabad itself, whilst that fair city was the capital and eye of all Hindustan.’42
