| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: "And further away I saw others and then more at another point
in the wall. It was a long lax line of men in open order.
"Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command,
and his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds
towards the temple. He scrambled down with them and led them.
He came facing towards me, and when he saw me he stopped.
"At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when
I had seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid
them. I shouted to the officer.
"'You must not come here,' I cried, '_I_ am here. I am here with my
dead.'
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: shall get through with the one and the other as rapidly as possible.
The inadequate boat finally arrived at a precarious landing, the
natives, waist-deep in the surf, assisting. I was carried ashore,
and while the evening meal was being prepared, I wandered to and
fro along the rocky, shattered shore. Bits of surf-harried
beach clove the worn granite, or whatever the rocks of Cape
Farewell may be composed of, and as I followed the ebbing tide
down one of these soft stretches, I saw the thing. Were one
to bump into a Bengal tiger in the ravine behind the Bimini
Baths, one could be no more surprised than was I to see a
perfectly good quart thermos bottle turning and twisting in the
The Land that Time Forgot |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac: Paris to deck her beauty with /chiffons/ or some choice novelty.
Desirous of giving her cousins a sense of home and its every
enjoyment, from which they had so long been severed, she made her
chateau, in spite of the remonstrances of her late guardian, the most
completely comfortable house in Champagne.
Robert d'Hauteserre saw nothing of this hidden drama; he never noticed
his brother's love for Laurence. As to the girl herself, he liked to
tease her about her coquetry,--for he confounded that odious defect
with the natural desire to please; he was always mistaken in matters
of feeling, taste, and the higher ethics. So, whenever this man of the
middle-ages appeared on the scene, Laurence immediately made him,
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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 Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: to be wise.
Minora and Irais arrived yesterday together; or rather,
when the carriage drove up, Irais got out of it alone, and informed
me that there was a strange girl on a bicycle a little way behind.
I sent back the carriage to pick her up, for it was dusk and
the roads are terrible.
"But why do you have strange girls here at all?" asked Irais
rather peevishly, taking off her hat in the library before the fire,
and otherwise making herself very much at home; "I don't like them.
I'm not sure that they're not worse than husbands who are out of order.
Who is she? She would bicycle from the station, and is, I am sure,
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
