| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft: that traffick could be tactfully and judiciously broken off. Then,
upon a signal, the cats all leaped gracefully with their friend
packed securely in their midst; while in a black cave on an unhallowed
summit of the moon-mountains still vainly waited the crawling
chaos Nyarlathotep.
The leap of the cats through space was very
swift; and being surrounded by his companions Carter did not see
this time the great black shapelessnesses that lurk and caper
and flounder in the abyss. Before he fully realised what had happened
he was back in his familiar room at the inn at Dylath-Leen, and
the stealthy, friendly cats were pouring out of the window in
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: passed that way. At last we turned back, and under the walls of
some outbuildings I heard a smothered, wailing cry, so stifled
that it was scarcely audible. The sound seemed to come from a
place that might have been a granary. I went in at all risks, and
there we found Juliette. With the instinct of despair, she had
buried herself deep in the hay, hiding her face in it to deaden
those dreadful cries--pudency even stronger than grief. She was
sobbing and crying like a child, but there was a more poignant,
more piteous sound in the sobs. There was nothing left in the
world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her mistress
submitting with the supine listlessness of a dying animal. The
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: well as in ethics, hide things from the wise and prudent, from the
proud, complete, self-contained systematiser like Aristotle, who must
needs explain all things in heaven and earth by his own formulae, and
his entelechies and energies, and the rest of the notions which he has
made for himself out of his own brain, and then pack each thing away in
its proper niche in his great cloud-universe of conceptions? Is it that
God hides things from such men many a time, and reveals them to babes,
to gentle, affectionate, simple-hearted men, such as we know Archimedes
to have been, who do not try to give an explanation for a fact, but feel
how awful and divine it is, and wrestle reverently and stedfastly with
it, as Jacob with the Angel, and will not let it go, until it bless
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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 The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The huge and haggard shape
Of that unknown North Cape,
Whose form is like a wedge.
"The sea was rough and stormy,
The tempest howled and wailed,
And the sea-fog, like a ghost,
Haunted that dreary coast,
But onward still I sailed.
"Four days I steered to eastward,
Four days without a night:
Round in a fiery ring
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