| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: long, fan-shaped, spreading taluses, carried conviction to the spectator
that it was but a frail bit of rock, that its life was little and brief,
that upon it had been laid the merciless curse of nature. Change! Change
must unknit the very knots of the center of the earth. So its strength lay
in the sublimity of its defiance. It meant to endure to the last rolling
grain of sand. It was a dead mountain of rock, without spirit, yet it
taught a grand lesson to the seeing eye.
Life was only a part, perhaps an infinitely small part of nature's plan.
Death and decay were just as important to her inscrutable design. The uni-
verse had not been created for life, ease, pleasure, and happiness of a man
creature developed from lower organisms. If nature's secret was the
The Call of the Canyon |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: they had brought with them from their seeing days, and had
dismissed all these things as idle fancies and replaced them with
new and saner explanations. Much of their imagination had
shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new
imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and finger-tips.
Slowly Nunez realised this: that his expectation of wonder and
reverence at his origin and his gifts was not to be borne out; and
after his poor attempt to explain sight to them had been set aside
as the confused version of a new-made being describing the marvels
of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into
listening to their instruction. And the eldest of the blind men
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