Daedalus taught him how to fly. When both were prepared for flight, Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high, because the heat of the sun would melt the wax, nor too low, because the sea foam would soak the feathers. They had passed Samos, Delos and Lebynthos by the time the boy, forgetting himself, began to soar upward toward the sun. The blazing sun softened the wax that held the feathers together and they came off. Icarus quickly fell in the sea and drowned. His father cried, bitterly lamenting his own arts, and called the island near the place where
The Silence of the Sirens Sirens. Canonically, Ulysses tied himself to his ship's mast so that he could experience the Sirens without being driven mad and jumping into the sea. He ordered his crew to stop their ears with wax, so that they would not be tempted by the siren song to steer the ship into the rocks on which the creatures perched. In Kafka's version, however, Ulysses puts wax in his own ears, and is then tied to the mast. Kafka's telling asserts that the Sirens' silence is an even more deadly weapon than their song, and further states that the Sirens fell silent