with apparatus as unsuitable
as Bladud's wings, paying the inevitable penalty. Another version of the
story gives St Peter instead of St Paul as the one whose prayers foiled
Simon--apart from the identity of the apostle, the two accounts are
similar, and both define the attitude of the age toward investigation
and experiment in things untried.

Another and later circumstantial story, with similar evidence of some
fact behind it, is that of the Saracen of Constantinople, who, in the
reign of the Emperor Comnenus--some little time before Norman William
made Saxon Harold swear away his crown on the bones of the saints at
Rouen--attempted to fly round the hippodrome at Constantinople, having
Comnenus among the great throng who gathered to witness the feat.
The Saracen chose for his starting-point a tower in the midst of the
hippodrome, and on the top of the tower he stood, clad in a long white
robe which was stiffened with rods so as to spread and catch the breeze,
waiting for a favourable wind to strike on him. The wind was so long in
coming that the spectators grew impatient. 'Fly, O Saracen!' they
called to him. 'Do not keep us waiting so long while you try the wind!'
Comnenus, who had present with him the Sultan of the Turks, gave it
as his opinion that the experiment was both dangerous and vain, and,
possibly in an attempt to controvert such statement, the Saracen leaned
into the wind and 'rose like a bird 'at the outset. But the record of
Cousin, who tells the story in his Histoire de Constantinople, states
that 'the weight of his body having more power to drag him down than his
artificial wings had to sustain him, he broke his bones, and his evil
plight was such that he did not long survive.'

Obviously, the Saracen was anticipating Lilienthal and his gliders by
some centuries; like Simon, a genuine experimenter--both legends
bear the impress of fact supporting them. Contemporary with him, and
belonging to the history rather than the legends of flight, was Oliver,
the monk of Malmesbury, who in the year 1065 made himself wings after
the pattern of those supposed to have been used by Daedalus, attaching
them to his hands and feet and attempting to fly with them. Twysden, in
his Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores X, sets forth the story of Oliver,
who chose a high tower as his starting-point, and launched himself in
the air. As a matter of course, he fell, permanently injuring himself,
and died some time later.

After