| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: Cossacks saw that they had come within gunshot, their matchlocks
thundered all together, and they continued to fire without cessation.
The detonations resounded through the distant fields and meadows,
merging into one continuous roar. The whole plain was shrouded in
smoke, but the Zaporozhtzi continued to fire without drawing
breath--the rear ranks doing nothing but loading the guns and handing
them to those in front, thus creating amazement among the enemy, who
could not understand how the Cossacks fired without reloading. Amid
the dense smoke which enveloped both armies, it could not be seen how
first one and then another dropped: but the Lyakhs felt that the balls
flew thickly, and that the affair was growing hot; and when they
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
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 Wyoming by William MacLeod Raine: of glorious colors. Lost in thought, space slipped under her
wheels unnoticed. Not till her car refused the spur and slowed to
a despondent halt did she observe that velvet night was falling
over the land.
She prowled round the machine after the fashion of the motorist,
examining details that might be the cause of the trouble. She
discovered soon enough with instant dismay that the gasolene tank
was empty. Reddy, always unreliable, must have forgotten to fill
it when she told him to.
By the road she must be thirty miles from home if she were a
step; across country as the crow flies, perhaps twenty. She was a
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