| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: with them some rotten hippo-meat, which couldn't have lasted
very long, anyway, even if the pilgrims hadn't, in the midst
of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity
of it overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceeding;
but it was really a case of legitimate self-defence. You
can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating,
and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.
Besides that, they had given them every week three pieces
of brass wire, each about nine inches long; and the theory
was they were to buy their provisions with that currency
in riverside villages. You can see how THAT worked.
Heart of Darkness |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: equally well kept. This little hamlet, separated from the village by
its gardens, was already called Les Tascherons, a name it keeps to the
present day.
The village itself mounted to very little, but thirty or more outlying
farms belonged to it. In the valley, leading down to the river,
irrigating channels like those of La Marche and Berry indicated the
flow of water around the village by the green fringe of verdure about
them; Montegnac seemed tossed in their midst like a vessel at sea.
When a house, an estate, a village, a region, passes from the wretched
condition to a prosperous one, without becoming either rich or
splendid, life seems so easy, so natural to living beings, that the
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: romances of the time, but might have been borrowed at second
hand from a piece of tapestry. It was a stage in the history
of mankind which we may see paralleled, to some extent, in
the first infant school, where the representations of lions
and elephants alternate round the wall with moral verses and
trite presentments of the lesser virtues. So that to live in
a house of many pictures was tantamount, for the time, to a
liberal education in itself.
(1) Champollion-Figeac's LOUIS ET CHARLES D'ORLEANS, p. 348.
At Charles's birth an order of knighthood was inaugurated in
his honour. At nine years old, he was a squire; at eleven,
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: they said, 'is for my father broken on the wheel. This for my
brother in the galleys. That for my mother or my sister imprisoned
in your cursed convents.' Each gave his blow and his reason; and
then all kneeled and sang psalms around the body till the dawn.
With the dawn, still singing, they defiled away towards Frugeres,
farther up the Tarn, to pursue the work of vengeance, leaving Du
Chayla's prison-house in ruins, and his body pierced with two-and-
fifty wounds upon the public place.
'Tis a wild night's work, with its accompaniment of psalms; and it
seems as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that
town upon the Tarn. But the story does not end, even so far as
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