| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: cannon; for at this time Bonaparte was traversing Egypt.
This thought gave him new life. The palm tree seemed to bend with the
weight of the ripe fruit. He shook some of it down. When he tasted
this unhoped-for manna, he felt sure that the palms had been
cultivated by a former inhabitant--the savory, fresh meat of the dates
were proof of the care of his predecessor. He passed suddenly from
dark despair to an almost insane joy. He went up again to the top of
the hill, and spent the rest of the day in cutting down one of the
sterile palm trees, which the night before had served him for shelter.
A vague memory made him think of the animals of the desert; and in
case they might come to drink at the spring, visible from the base of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: the nation's preposterous breakfast--I who drank a cup of coffee while
buttoning my blouse in the morning.
"Nothing at all," cried Herr Hoffmann from Berlin. "Ach, when I was in
England in the morning I used to eat."
He turned up his eyes and his moustache, wiping the soup drippings from his
coat and waistcoat.
"Do they really eat so much?" asked Fraulein Stiegelauer. "Soup and
baker's bread and pig's flesh, and tea and coffee and stewed fruit, and
honey and eggs, and cold fish and kidneys, and hot fish and liver? All the
ladies eat, too, especially the ladies."
"Certainly. I myself have noticed it, when I was living in a hotel in
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