| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: No boat had left the harbor in the meantime--there was not a
railroad within hundreds of miles--there was no other white
settlement that the two could reach under several days of arduous
marching accompanied by a well-equipped safari. They had
simply vanished into thin air, for the native he had sent to
inspect the ground beneath the open window had just returned
to report that there was no sign of a footstep there, and what
sort of creatures were they who could have dropped that distance
to the soft turf without leaving spoor? Herr Skopf shuddered.
Yes, it was a great mystery--there was something uncanny about
the whole thing--he hated to think about it, and he dreaded the
 The Son of Tarzan |
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 The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: not in his case mean superficial; whatever he knows, he knows to the
bottom. He has a genius, an intuitive faculty for business. He is the
oracle of all the lynxes that rule the Paris market; they will not
touch an investment until Palma has looked into it. He looks solemn,
he listens, ponders, and reflects; his interlocutor thinks that after
this consideration he has come round his man, till Palma says, 'This
will not do for me.'--The most extraordinary thing about Palma, to my
mind, is the fact that he and Werbrust were partners for ten years,
and there was never the shadow of a disagreement between them."
"That is the way with the very strong or the very weak; any two
between the extremes fall out and lose no time in making enemies of
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