| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: wounded limb, then lifted me up so that I rested upon my sound
foot.
'Look!' she cried in a piercing voice, and pointing to the scars
and unhealed wounds upon my face and leg; 'look on the work of the
Teule and the Tlascalan, see how the foe is dealt with who
surrenders to them. Yield if you will, desert us if you will, but
I say that then your own bodies shall be marked in a like fashion,
till not an ounce of gold is left that can minister to the greed of
the Teule, or a man or a maiden who can labour to satisfy his
indolence.'
Then she ceased, and letting me sink gently to the ground, for I
Montezuma's Daughter |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.
It was on Monday, June 3rd, that we saw the first of the half-buried
blocks. I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched
- in objective reality - a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every
respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings. There
was a distinct trace of carving - and my hands trembled as I recognised
part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through
years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research.
A month
of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages
of wear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths
Shadow out of Time |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: serving to emphasize the glory of the face. Fanny Brandeis'
face, as the figure grew, line by line, was a glorious
thing, too.
She was working rapidly. She laid down her pencil, now, and
leaned back, squinting her eyes critically. She looked
grimly pleased. Her hair was rather rumpled, and her cheeks
very pink. She took up her pen, now, and began to ink her
drawing with firm black strokes. As she worked a little
crow of delight escaped her--the same absurd crow of triumph
that had sounded that day in Winnebago, years and years
before, when she, a school girl in a red tam o' shanter, had
Fanny Herself |
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 Enemies of Books by William Blades: but simply follows a senseless kind of classification. For instance:
One set of volumes contains nothing but copper-plate engraved titles,
and woe betide the grand old Dutch folios of the seventeenth century
if they cross his path. Another is a volume of coarse or quaint titles,
which certainly answer the end of showing how idiotic and conceited
some authors have been. Here you find Dr. Sib's "Bowels opened
in Divers Sermons," 1650, cheek by jowl with the discourse attributed
falsely to Huntington, the Calvinist, "Die and be damned,"
with many others too coarse to be quoted. The odd titles adopted
for his poems by Taylor, the water-poet, enliven several pages,
and make one's mouth water for the books themselves. A third
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