| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Oedipus Trilogy by Sophocles: Thee, Cithaeron, I shall hail,
As the nurse and foster-mother of our Oedipus shall greet
Ere tomorrow's full moon rises, and exalt thee as is meet.
Dance and song shall hymn thy praises, lover of our royal race.
Phoebus, may my words find grace!
(Ant.)
Child, who bare thee, nymph or goddess? sure thy sure was more than
man,
Haply the hill-roamer Pan.
Of did Loxias beget thee, for he haunts the upland wold;
Or Cyllene's lord, or Bacchus, dweller on the hilltops cold?
 Oedipus Trilogy |
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 At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: region. Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips
- even after all we had seen and guessed. Then, as we picked our
way cautiously over the debris of the great floor, there came
a sight which for the time excluded all other matters.
It was
the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle
of the ramp’s lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto
been screened from our view. There they were - the three sledges
missing from Lake’s camp - shaken by a hard usage which must have
included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry
and debris, as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable
 At the Mountains of Madness |