| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: she is like the cat who rubs herself against your legs; a white girl
with ash-colored hair, delicate in appearance, but who must have downy
threads on the third phalanx of her fingers, and all along her cheeks
a white down whose line, luminous on fine days, begins at her ears and
loses itself on her neck."
"Ah, the other, my dear De Marsay! She has black eyes which have never
wept, but which burn; black eyebrows which meet and give her an air of
hardness contradicted by the compact curve of her lips, on which the
kisses do not stay, lips burning and fresh; a Moorish color that warms
a man like the sun. But--upon my word of honor, she is like you!"
"You flatter her!"
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: could have seen it, the perspiration broke out on his forehead,
while his throat was as dry as tinder. A last supreme scream was
cut short suddenly.
"The silence which ensued was even more dreadful. Davidson felt
sick. He tore his feet from the spot and walked straight before
him, gripping the revolver and peering into the obscurity
fearfully. Suddenly a bulky shape sprang from the ground within a
few yards of him and bounded away. Instinctively he fired at it,
started to run in pursuit, and stumbled against something soft
which threw him down headlong.
"Even as he pitched forward on his head he knew it could be nothing
Within the Tides |
