| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied
the emotions conveyed in the carvings, I prayed that none ever
might. There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them
- Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Lands - and I thank Heaven no
one has been able to land and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical
about old tales and fears as I used to be, and I do not laugh
now at the prehuman sculptor’s notion that lightning paused meaningfully
now and then at each of the brooding crests, and that an unexplained
glow shone from one of those terrible pinnacles all through the
long polar night. There may be a very real and very monstrous
meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold
At the Mountains of Madness |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: practical men, liberal and expansive, and yet with a firm standing-
ground for thought and action, he learns to complain less and less of
Cambridge studies, and more and more of that conceit and haste of his
own, which kept him from reaping the full advantage of her training.
These Lectures, as I have said, are altogether crude and fragmentary--
how, indeed, could they be otherwise, dealing with so vast a subject,
and so long a period of time? They are meant neither as Essays nor as
Orations, but simply as a collection of hints to those who may wish to
work out the subject for themselves; and, I trust, as giving some
glimpses of a central idea, in the light of which the spiritual history
of Alexandria, and perhaps of other countries also, may be seen to have
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