| 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 left all those things to wreck and ruin just to save a remnant
at least of my life. While I had been in love with her before I knew
that she had any care for me, before I had imagined that she would
dare--that we should dare, all my life had seemed vain and hollow,
dust and ashes. It WAS dust and ashes. Night after night and through
the long days I had longed and desired--my soul had beaten against
the thing forbidden!
"But it is impossible for one man to tell another just these things.
It's emotion, it's a tint, a light that comes and goes. Only while
it's there, everything changes, everything. The thing is I came
away and left them in their Crisis to do what they could."
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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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: But she only saw an old woman slicing a man's head off with a knife.
"There it falls!" she murmured. She then turned to Terence and
asked him anxiously some question about a man with mules, which he
could not understand. "Why doesn't he come? Why doesn't he come?"
she repeated. He was appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs
in connection with illness like this, and turning instinctively
to Helen, but she was doing something at a table in the window,
and did not seem to realise how great the shock to him must be.
He rose to go, for he could not endure to listen any longer;
his heart beat quickly and painfully with anger and misery.
As he passed Helen she asked him in the same weary, unnatural,
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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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: great distance, having received the news, quickly got together
seven thousand men, and hastened to relieve Cicero. The
besiegers were aware of it, and went to meet him, with great
confidence that they should easily overpower such an handful of
men. Caesar, to increase their presumption, seemed to avoid
fighting, and still marched off, till he found a place
conveniently situated for a few to engage against many, where he
encamped. He kept his soldiers from making any attack upon the
enemy, and commanded them to raise the ramparts higher, and
barricade the gates, that by show of fear, they might heighten
the enemy's contempt of them. Till at last they came without
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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 Out of Time's Abyss by Edgar Rice Burroughs: they first developed into tadpole form was deposited, with
millions of others, in one of the warm pools and with it a
poisonous serum that the carnivora instinctively shunned.
Down the warm stream from the pool floated the countless billions
of eggs and tadpoles, developing as they drifted slowly toward
the sea. Some became tadpoles in the pool, some in the sluggish
stream and some not until they reached the great inland sea.
In the next stage they became fishes or reptiles, An-Tak was not
positive which, and in this form, always developing, they swam
far to the south, where, amid the rank and teeming jungles, some
of them evolved into amphibians. Always there were those whose
Out of Time's Abyss |
