In the fall Leonardo was at Imola. There he created another of his beautifully rendered maps. He drew this with the help of a magnetic compass of his own invention. It consisted of a board with an arc on it and a compass needle, and was probably the first magnetic needle on a horizontal axis. This time the map was of the city itself, the walls, the castle and the principal buildings all touched with color and the river winding through the fields. Drawn in the shape of a circle, it resembles a view through a telescope from directly above. In Imola, too, he met Niccolò Machiavelli, the famous historian and political scientist, who was an emissary from the Signoria, the Council which now governed Florence. These two men became friends and, later, collaborators in Leonardo’s scheme to make the Arno river navigable to the sea. At this time Cesare Borgia, having achieved great success in his military campaigns and confident of his conquests, decided to return to Rome. With the disbanding of Borgia’s headquarters at Imola, Leonardo’s duties were finished. Together with his new friend Niccolò Machiavelli and two other Florentines, he left Imola and the service of Cesare Borgia to return to Florence. In January of 1503, a mathematician named Giovanni Battista Danti attempted a flight in a machine that he had designed. This flight was part of the entertainment at a wedding reception in Perugia. Danti climbed into his apparatus on top of the tower of St. Mary of the Virgin. It was pushed off into the air, hovered a few seconds, then began slowly drifting toward the ground. But suddenly, one of its wings hit a building projection and it crashed. Danti was carried away with a broken leg. The news of the event traveled quickly to Florence. When Leonardo heard about it, he eagerly questioned all those who had either seen it or had heard it described first hand. Danti’s attempted flight excited Leonardo for now he realized that he was no longer alone in his search. With a sense of urgency he returned to the problems of flying. He felt now that the solution to flight might be in the swift gusts of air through the ravines and the spread wings of the eagle drifting high in the sky. 10 _Shattered Hopes_