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 the sun, too, that the founders of the Peruvian Inca
dynasty, Manco Capac and his wife Mama Huella Capac, flew to earth near
Lake Titicaca, to make the only successful experiment in pure tyranny
that the world has ever witnessed. Teutonic legend gives forth Wieland
the Smith, who made himself a dress with wings and, clad in it, rose
and descended against the wind and in spite of it. Indian mythology, in
addition to the story of the demons and their rigid dirigible, already
quoted, gives the story of Hanouam, who fitted himself with wings by
means of which he sailed in the air and, according to his desire, landed
in the sacred Lauka. Bladud, the ninth king of Britain, is said to have
crowned his feats of wizardry by making himself wings and attempting
to fly--but the effort cost him a broken neck. Bladud may have been as
mythic as Uther, and again he may have been a very early pioneer. The
Finnish epic, 'Kalevala,' tells how Ilmarinen the Smith 'forged an eagle
of fire,' with 'boat's walls between the wings,' after which he 'sat
down on the bird's back and bones,' and flew.
Pure myths, these, telling how the desire to fly was characteristic of
every age and every people, and how, from time to time, there arose an
experimenter bolder than his fellows, who made some attempt to translate
desire into achievement. And the spirit that animated these pioneers,
in a time when things new were accounted things accursed, for the most
part, has found expression in this present century in the utter daring
and disregard of both danger and pain that stamps the flying man, a type
of humanity differing in spirit from his earthbound fellows as fully as
the soldier differs from the priest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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