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