There is an old rabbinic legend about Alexander the Great that the Ma'aseh Book and other medieval collections loved to retell. The sources are summarized in the 1924 anthology The Exempla of the Rabbis, compiled by the Romanian-British folklorist Moses Gaster, which gathers tales from the Book of Exempla and medieval manuscripts.
In one strange episode, Alexander wished to see the edge of the sky. He captured two great eagles, starved them, and tied meat above their heads just out of reach. He stood between them on some kind of cage or throne, holding the bait high. The eagles beat their wings upward, lifting him with them, striving always after the meat they could never quite catch. Up and up they flew, until the air grew bitter and the cold bit into the conqueror's face so sharply that his own eyelids dropped shut and he could climb no higher. The bright empire below had shrunk to nothing, and the heavens he had hoped to enter were still unimaginably far above. He signaled the descent.
Then Alexander wanted to see the floor of the ocean. He had a great glass box constructed, and men lowered him into the deep. He sank and sank, peering out through the glass walls at the water growing darker. Then he heard a voice. The iron of the axe has been falling for seven years already, and has not yet touched the bottom. The sea was unsearchable. Whatever he thought he was measuring had no floor.
He gave the signal and was hauled back up. This exemplum, preserved as number 5 in Gaster's 1924 collection, is not really a travel tale. It is a meditation on the limits of conquest. Alexander could reach the Indus and cross the Hellespont, but the sky and the sea were not his to own. The lesson the Rabbis drew is simple and sharp: the world-conqueror is still a small thing between a falling axe and a shivering eagle.