| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: sunbeams could not play on it. And no man knew that once the marsh had
leapt forth clear and blue from under a hood of snow on the mountain's top:
aye, and that the turning of one stone might have caused that it had run on
and on, and mingled its song with the sea's song for ever.'"
The stranger was silent for a while.
Then he said, "Should he answer you and say, 'What do I care! What are
coves and mountain tops to me? Gold is real, and the power to crush men
within my hand'; tell him no further.
"But if by some chance he should listen, then, say this one thing to him,
clearly in the ear, that he may not fail to hear it: 'The morning may
break grey, and the midday be dark and stormy; but the glory of the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: profoundly seated adjustments - all our tacit acceptance of the
inner antarctic as a waste utterly and irrevocably void of every
vestige of normal life. What we heard was not the fabulous note
of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness
an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. Instead,
it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarized
by our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo
Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where such things
ought not to be. To be brief - it was simply the raucous squawking
of a penguin.
The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses
At the Mountains of Madness |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart: automobile coat over the black satin she had worn at the
Clevelands' dinner, and I in cream lace, the skirt gathered up
from the kitchen floor, with Bella's ermine pelerine around my
bare shoulders, and dishes and overturned chairs everywhere.
Bella knew more about the lower regions of her ex-home than I
would have thought. She opened a door in a corner and led the way
through a narrow hall past the refrigerating room, to a huge,
cemented cellar, with a furnace in the center, and a half-dozen
electric lights making it really brilliant.
"Get a chair," Bella said over her shoulder, excitedly. "I can
get out easily here, through the coal hole. Imagine my--"
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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 Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: man's wrath, a distant relative (one of those cousins of small means
and much astuteness about whom shrewd provincials are wont to remark,
"No lawsuits for me with him!") had, as it were by accident, come to
visit Monsieur de Bourbonne, and INCIDENTALLY informed him of his
nephew's ruin. Monsieur Octave de Camps, he said, having wasted his
means on a certain Madame Firmiani, was now reduced to teaching
mathematics for a living, while awaiting his uncle's death, not daring
to let him know of his dissipations. This distant cousin, a sort of
Charles Moor, was not ashamed to give this fatal news to the old
gentleman as he sat by his fire, digesting a profuse provincial
dinner.
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