| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moran of the Lady Letty by Frank Norris: lapsed to a zephyr, the schooner rolled lazily southward with the
leisurely nonchalance of a grazing ox. At noon, just after
dinner, a few cat's-paws curdled the milky-blue whiteness of the
glassy surface, and the water once more began to talk beneath the
bow-sprit. It was very hot. The sun spun silently like a
spinning brass discus over the mainmast. On the fo'c'sle head the
Chinamen were asleep or smoking opium. It was Charlie's watch.
Kitchell dozed in his hammock in the shadow of the mainsheet.
Wilbur was below tinkering with his paint-pot about the cabin.
The stillness was profound. It was the stillness of the summer
sea at high noon.
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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 Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: he was not left for the zapilotes, as the Aztecs call the vultures,
like the rest of them.
After that we wept ourselves to sleep in each other's arms, Otomie
murmuring from time to time, 'Oh! my husband, I would that we were
asleep and forgotten, we and the babe together.'
'Rest now,' I answered, 'for death is very near to us.'
The morrow came, and with it a deadlier fray than any that had gone
before, and after it more morrows and more deaths, but still we
lived on, for Guatemoc gave us of his food. Then Cortes sent has
heralds demanding our surrender, and now three-fourths of the city
was a ruin, and three-fourths of its defenders were dead. The dead
Montezuma's Daughter |
