| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: the cattle? He is too weak to climb the steep path to the plain
above, nor was there time to gather folk to carry him. Lastly,
even if there were time which there was not, and we went thither
they would track us out and kill us. For the rest I did not
care, nor for myself, but that the lady Heddana should be
butchered who was more to me than a hundred lives, and through my
treachery--ah! for that I cared.
I called on my Spirit to help me, but it would not come. My
Spirit was dead in me because now I would do good and not ill.
Yet another Spirit came, that of one Mameena whom once you knew.
She came angrily, like a storm, and I shrank before her. She
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: right, Captain Hagberd; I am not impatient."
"Well, my dear, you haven't long to wait now,"
he would answer with a sudden bashfulness, and
looking uneasily, as though he had suspected that
there was something wrong somewhere.
Every Monday she paid him his rent over the
railings. He clutched the shillings greedily. He
grudged every penny he had to spend on his main-
tenance, and when he left her to make his purchases
his bearing changed as soon as he got into the
street. Away from the sanction of her pity, he felt
To-morrow |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: altogether heedless of a drizzling rain that was wetting him
through and through....'
Section 5
This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly
apprehended deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the
approach of winter. It was too much for the great mass of those
unwilling and incompetent nomads to realise that an age had
ended, that the old help and guidance existed no longer, that
times would not mend again, however patiently they held out. They
were still in many cases looking to Paris when the first
snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
The Last War: A World Set Free |
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 Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft: over it and into it with the frenzied claws and teeth of a divine
battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a stricken slave,
but was soon overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders.
Then he lay in the utter blackness hearing the clangour of war
and the shouts of the victors, and feeling the soft paws of his
friends as they rushed to and fro over him in the fray.
At last
awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again
it was upon a strange scene. The great shining disc of the earth,
thirteen times greater than that of the moon as we see it, had
risen with floods of weird light over the lunar landscape; and
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |
