| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: Another time, 'Pierre Cambremer, did you know your lad very nearly put
out the eye of the little Pougard girl?'--'Ha! he'll like the girls,'
said Pierre. Nothing troubled him. At ten years old the little cur
fought everybody, and amused himself with cutting the hens' necks off
and ripping up the pigs; in fact, you might say he wallowed in blood.
'He'll be a famous soldier,' said Cambremer, 'he's got the taste of
blood.' Now, you see," said the fisherman, "I can look back and
remember all that--and Cambremer, too," he added, after a pause. "By
the time Jacques Cambremer was fifteen or sixteen years of age he had
come to be--what shall I say?--a shark. He amused himself at Guerande,
and was after the girls at Savenay. Then he wanted money. He robbed
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer: and the barbed wire must also be counted with.
"The entrance, as you know, is by the way of a kind of cutting.
There is a gate at the foot of the steps (they are some of the original
steps of the priory, Dr. Petrie), and another gate at the head."
He paused, and smiled around upon us boyishly.
"My secret defenses remain to be mentioned," he resumed;
and, opening a cupboard, he pointed to a row of batteries,
with a number of electric bells upon the wall behind.
"The more vulnerable spots are connected at night with these bells,"
he said triumphantly. "Any attempt to scale the barbed wire
or to force either gate would set two or more of these ringing.
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and eyes of the
Alserstrasse.
Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl
was closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not
his, or of his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely,
alluring, rather puzzled at this moment, was also a situation.
For there was a situation. He had suspected it that morning,
listening to the delicatessen-seller's narrative of Rosa's
account of the disrupted colony across in the old lodge; he had
been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the dark
entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright
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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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: of the destruction of the world, simultaneous with the carrying on of
the pettiest intrigues and the performance of court comedies by the
world's saviours, who, in their "laisser aller," recall the Day of
Judgment not so much as the days of the Fronde; the official collective
genius of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single
individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks
through the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the
prescriptive enemies of the public interests until it finally finds it
in the arbitrary will of a filibuster. If ever a slice from history is
drawn black upon black, it is this. Men and events appear as reversed
"Schlemihls," [#1 The hero In Chamisso's "Peter Schiemihi," who loses
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