| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs: learned to love after a vague and abstract manner a willing
prisoner in his arms. Now he was surprised that she repulsed him.
He came close to her once more and took hold of her arm.
She turned upon him like a tigress, striking his great breast
with her tiny hands.
Tarzan could not understand it.
A moment ago and it had been his intention to hasten Jane
back to her people, but that little moment was lost now in the
dim and distant past of things which were but can never be again,
and with it the good intentions had gone to join the impossible.
Since then Tarzan of the Apes had felt a warm, lithe form
Tarzan of the Apes |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: his enthusiastic companion; but with the coming of the London
guests the hunting had deteriorated into mere killing. Slaughter the
host would not permit; yet the purpose of the hunts were for heads
and skins and not for food. So Meriem remained behind and spent
her days either with My Dear upon the shaded verandah, or riding
her favorite pony across the plains or to the forest edge.
Here she would leave him untethered while she took to the trees
for the moment's unalloyed pleasures of a return to the wild,
free existence of her earlier childhood.
Then would come again visions of Korak, and, tired at last
of leaping and swinging through the trees, she would stretch
The Son of Tarzan |
| 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: plain, and even heavy; there was little to please the eye, but
nothing to shock; and I thought gentleness lay more nearly at the
spring of behaviour than in many more ornate and delicate societies.
I say delicate, where I cannot say refined; a thing may be fine, like
ironwork, without being delicate, like lace. There was here less
delicacy; the skin supported more callously the natural surface of
events, the mind received more bravely the crude facts of human
existence; but I do not think that there was less effective
refinement, less consideration for others, less polite suppression of
self. I speak of the best among my fellow-passengers; for in the
steerage, as well as in the saloon, there is a mixture. Those, then,
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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 Message by Honore de Balzac: air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach
was lumbering along,--these things, together with an
indescribable magnetic something, drew us before long into one of
those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with
the more complacency because the intercourse is by its very
nature transient, and makes no implicit demands upon the future.
We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women
and love. Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such
matters, we proceeded naturally to the topic of our lady-loves.
Young as we both were, we still admired "the woman of a certain
age," that is to say, the woman between thirty-five and forty.
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