Today's Stichomancy for The Rock

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:

not have floated on the future as I did! Why was I thinking? Whence comes evil?--who knows! Ideas drop into our hearts or into our heads without consulting us. No courtesan was ever more capricious nor more imperious than conception is to artists; we must grasp it, like fortune, by the hair when it comes.

Astride upon my thought, like Astolphe on his hippogriff, I was galloping through worlds, suiting them to my fancy. Presently, as I looked about me to find some omen for the bold productions my wild imagination was urging me to undertake, a pretty cry, the cry of a woman issuing refreshed and joyous from a bath, rose above the murmur of the rippling fringes as their flux and reflux marked a white line

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

the women and children, for then indeed we might be overtaken by the Abyssinians. It would be far better to select a small guard of your bravest men, and leave word behind that we are riding WEST. Then, when the Abyssinians come they will be put upon the wrong trail should they have it in their hearts to pursue us, and if they do not they will at least ride north with less rapidity than as though they thought that we were ahead of them."

"The serpent is less wise than thou, Werper," said Mohammed Beyd with a smile. "It shall be done as you

Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft:

anything he did -- that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment -- a languid Elagabalus of the tombs. Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he had

Herbert West: Reanimator

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 Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis:

With violets in my hands I wandered to the wilds, and there I met a Buzzard. He was Being Himself! I wove a wreath of the violets and I crowned the Buzzard, and the Buzzard said, "Why do you crown me?" And I said, "Oh, Lovely Buz- zard, are you not Being Yourself? Are you not rebuking the Trivial Conventionalities of our Or- ganized Society? I know your Dream, O Buzzard! Accept this Crown of Violets from our little group!"

Come with me to the zoo, and I will bare our