| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: tribes some chosen totem animal. But this lone refuge was now
stripped from us, and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking
realization which the reader of these pages has doubtless long
ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in black
and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.
The
things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in
the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse.
Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects - but the
builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces
in rocks even then laid down well nigh a thousand million years
 At the Mountains of Madness |
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 Tattine by Ruth Ogden [Mrs. Charles W. Ide]: all about it as they sat together in the porch that morning after breakfast.
She even laughed her cap way over on one side, so that Tattine had to take out
the gold pins and put them in again to straighten it.
"But Grandma," said Tattine, when they had sobered down, "those puppies,
cunning as they are now, will just be cruel setters when they grow up, killing
everything they come across, birds and rabbits and chipmunks."
"Tattine," said Grandma Luty, with her dear, kindly smile "your Mother has
told me how disappointed you have been this summer in Betsy and Doctor and
little Black-and-white, and that now Barney has fallen into disgrace, since he
kept you so long in the ford the other day, but I want to tell you something.
You must not stop loving them at all because they do what you call cruel
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