A History of Aeronautics | Page 5

to emulate him. Icarus, fastening the wings to his shoulders with wax, was so imprudent as to fly too near the sun, when the wax melted and he fell, to lie mourned of water-nymphs on the shores of waters thenceforth Icarian. Between what we have assumed to be the base of fact, and the legend which has been invested with such poetic grace in Greek story, there is no more than a century or so of re-telling might give to any event among a people so simple and yet so given to imagery.
We may set aside as pure fable the stories of the winged horse of Perseus, and the flights of Hermes as messenger of the gods. With them may be placed the story of Empedocles, who failed to take Etna seriously enough, and found himself caught by an eruption while within the crater, so that, flying to safety in some hurry, he left behind but one sandal to attest that he had sought refuge in space--in all probability, if he escaped at all, he flew, but not in the sense that the aeronaut understands it. But, bearing in mind the many men who tried to fly in historic times, the legend of Icarus and Daedalus, in spite of the impossible form in which it is presented, may rank with the story of the Saracen of Constantinople, or with that of Simon the Magician. A simple folk would naturally idealise the man and magnify his exploit, as they magnified the deeds of some strong man to make the legends of Hercules, and there, full-grown from a mere legend, is the first record of a pioneer of flying. Such a theory is not nearly so fantastic as that which makes the Capnobates, on the strength of their name, the inventors of hot-air balloons. However it may be, both in story and in picture, Icarus and his less conspicuous father have inspired the Caucasian mind, and the world is the richer for them.
Of the unsupported myths--unsupported, that is, by even a shadow of probability--there is no end. Although Latin legend approaches nearer to fact than the Greek in some cases, in others it shows a disregard for possibilities which renders it of far less account. Thus Diodorus of Sicily relates that one Abaris travelled round the world on an arrow of gold, and Cassiodorus and Glycas and their like told of mechanical birds that flew and sang and even laid eggs. More credible is the story of Aulus Gellius, who in his Attic Nights tells how Archytas, four centuries prior to the opening of the Christian era, made a wooden pigeon that actually flew by means of a mechanism of balancing weights and the breath of a mysterious spirit hidden within it. There may yet arise one credulous enough to state that the mysterious spirit was precursor of the internal combustion engine, but, however that may be, the pigeon of Archytas almost certainly existed, and perhaps it actually glided or flew for short distances--or else Aulus Gellius was an utter liar, like Cassiodorus and his fellows. In far later times a certain John Muller, better known as Regiomontanus, is stated to have made an artificial eagle which accompanied Charles V. on his entry to and exit from Nuremberg, flying above the royal procession. But, since Muller died in 1436 and Charles was born in 1500, Muller may be ruled out from among the pioneers of mechanical flight, and it may be concluded that the historian of this event got slightly mixed in his dates.
Thus far, we have but indicated how one may draw from the richest stores from which the Aryan mind draws inspiration, the Greek and Latin mythologies and poetic adaptations of history. The existing legends of flight, however, are not thus to be localised, for with two possible exceptions they belong to all the world and to every civilisation, however primitive. The two exceptions are the Aztec and the Chinese; regarding the first of these, the Spanish conquistadores destroyed such civilisation as existed in Tenochtitlan so thoroughly that, if legend of flight was among the Aztec records, it went with the rest; as to the Chinese, it is more than passing strange that they, who claim to have known and done everything while the first of history was shaping, even to antedating the discovery of gunpowder that was not made by Roger Bacon, have not yet set up a claim to successful handling of a monoplane some four thousand years ago, or at least to the patrol of the Gulf of Korea and the Mongolian frontier by a forerunner of the 'blimp.'
The Inca civilisation of Peru yields up a myth akin to that of Icarus, which tells how the chieftain Ayar Utso grew wings and visited the sun--it was from