| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: everywhere, seen everything, a brilliant talker, and a man of
great personal beauty. Yet when I think of him in cold blood, far
away from the glamour of his presence, I am convinced from his
cynical speech and the look which I have caught in his eyes that
he is one who should be deeply distrusted. So I think, and so,
too, thinks my little Mary, who has a woman's quick insight into
character.
"And now there is only she to be described. She is my niece; but
when my brother died five years ago and left her alone in the
world I adopted her, and have looked upon her ever since as my
daughter. She is a sunbeam in my house--sweet, loving, beautiful,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: the "Moral and Material Progress of the State," and the Foreign
Office and the Government of India were delighted. Very few
native States take up English progress altogether, for they will
not believe, as Purun Dass showed he did, that what was good for
the Englishman must be twice as good for the Asiatic. The Prime
Minister became the honoured friend of Viceroys, and Governors,
and Lieutenant-Governors, and medical missionaries, and common
missionaries, and hard-riding English officers who came to shoot
in the State preserves, as well as of whole hosts of tourists
who travelled up and down India in the cold weather, showing how
things ought to be managed. In his spare time he would endow
The Second Jungle Book |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: laid upon our guesses. From the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a
wager offered or taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss in
the Corner, which we had rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil and
four Corners, was my own favourite game; but there were many who
preferred another, the humour of which was to box a person's ears
until he found out who had cuffed him.
This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of
weather, and in the highest possible spirits. We got in a cluster
like bees, sitting between each other's feet under lee of the deck-
houses. Stories and laughter went around. The children climbed
about the shrouds. White faces appeared for the first time, and
|
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 At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in black
and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.
The
things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in
the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse.
Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects - but the
builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces
in rocks even then laid down well nigh a thousand million years
- rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond
plastic groups of cells - rocks laid down before the true life
of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers
At the Mountains of Madness |
