| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: Crusades, from a time when Venice, a survivor of Imperial and
Christian Rome which had flung itself into the waters to escape the
Barbarians, was already powerful and illustrious, and the head of the
political and commercial world.
With a few rare exceptions this brilliant nobility has fallen into
utter ruin. Among the gondoliers who serve the English--to whom
history here reads the lesson of their future fate--there are
descendants of long dead Doges whose names are older than those of
sovereigns. On some bridge, as you glide past it, if you are ever in
Venice, you may admire some lovely girl in rags, a poor child
belonging, perhaps, to one of the most famous patrician families. When
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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 The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft: black host, till even this table-land grew small beneath them;
and as they worked northward over the wind-swept plateau of horror
Carter saw once again with a shudder the circle of crude monoliths
and the squat windowless building which he knew held that frightful
silken-masked blasphemy from whose clutches he had so narrowly
escaped. This time no descent was made as the army swept batlike
over the sterile landscape, passing the feeble fires of the unwholesome
stone villages at a great altitude, and pausing not at all to
mark the morbid twistings of the hooved, horned almost-humans
that dance and pipe eternally therein. Once they saw a Shantak-bird
flying low over the plain, but when it saw them it screamed noxiously
 The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |