They said in Sparta, "since Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god."

He climbed up the steep bank of the wadi into the still and growing twilight, with the punctuated ringing of bells in the distance, and thought: Alexander was here. Not so long ago, even. With a handful of men he braved the desert passage (two weeks and five days) and arrived early one morning as if having grown from the sands so that the villagers stood up in the thrushes and thought themselves dreaming. Alexander, Hephaestion with him, passed beneath the dusty arbors and the palm groves of Siwa, to the mountain and the oracle of the temple of Amon. He would ask her the question he had long rehearsed to himself, in private, when he thought no one could hear (though I did on more than one occasion). A simple, daring, obvious question, with an answer that pricks.

For a moment it was clear—his early painful death from a wound—the demise of his empire—his posthumous, bloated legend (inevitably accompanied, for the initiated, by the smell of burnt flesh and the taste of honey). He felt no joy at the oracle's reply. It was what he had hoped for, but the answer was tinged with darkness. Like Oedipus before him, he could not understand that the answer was the same for any man who dared to ask it: Yes. Always yes.

The Oracle answers the question you journey to ask of it, though it need not be the question you ask. Alexander realized only too late, with the force of a night falling, the Oracle answers the question in your heart.