| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in
the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account
could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly
from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have
sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the
cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of
hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and
made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There
had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They
had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen
Call of Cthulhu |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: stood on a mountain-peak, seeing your life as it might have
been, as it is? one quick instant, when custom lost its force
and every-day usage? when your friend, wife, brother, stood in
a new light? your soul was bared, and the grave,--a foretaste
of the nakedness of the Judgment-Day? So it came before him,
his life, that night. The slow tides of pain he had borne
gathered themselves up and surged against his soul. His squalid
daily life, the brutal coarseness eating into his brain, as the
ashes into his skin: before, these things had been a dull
aching into his consciousness; to-night, they were reality. He
griped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiff with soot, about
Life in the Iron-Mills |
