| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: Wrath, envy, treason, rape, and murder's rages,
Thy heinous hours wait on them as their pages.
'When truth and virtue have to do with thee,
A thousand crosses keep them from thy aid;
They buy thy help; but Sin ne'er gives a fee,
He gratis comes; and thou art well appay'd
As well to hear as grant what he hath said.
My Collatine would else have come to me
When Tarquin did, but he was stay'd by thee.
'Guilty thou art of murder and of theft;
Guilty of perjury and subornation;
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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 Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: set. Had they done so they knew there was no mercy to be
expected from Arab or Rajah; no rice to be got on credit in the
times of scarcity from either; and Almayer could not help them,
having at times hardly enough for himself. Almayer, in his
isolation and despair, often envied his near neighbour the
Chinaman, Jim-Eng, whom he could see stretched on a pile of cool
mats, a wooden pillow under his head, an opium pipe in his
nerveless fingers. He did not seek, however, consolation in
opium--perhaps it was too expensive--perhaps his white man's
pride saved him from that degradation; but most likely it was the
thought of his little daughter in the far-off Straits
Almayer's Folly |
