| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: grey cap. But when, after a time, he crossed over to the other side
of the deck he discovered that it was not the captain's head at all.
He became aware of grey hairs curling over the nape of the neck.
How could he have made that mistake? But on board ship away from
the land one does not expect to come upon a stranger.
Powell walked past the man. A thin, somewhat sunken face, with a
tightly closed mouth, stared at the distant French coast, vague like
a suggestion of solid darkness, lying abeam beyond the evening light
reflected from the level waters, themselves growing more sombre than
the sky; a stare, across which Powell had to pass and did pass with
a quick side glance, noting its immovable stillness. His passage
 Chance |
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 Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: Europe are punishable in Asia, and a vice in Paris becomes a necessity
when you have passed the Azores. There are no such things as hard-and-
fast rules; there are only conventions adapted to the climate. Fling a
man headlong into one social melting pot after another, and
convictions and forms and moral systems become so many meaningless
words to him. The one thing that always remains, the one sure instinct
that nature has implanted in us, is the instinct of self-interest. If
you had lived as long as I have, you would know that there is but one
concrete reality invariable enough to be worth caring about, and that
is--GOLD. Gold represents every form of human power. I have traveled.
I found out that there were either hills or plains everywhere: the
 Gobseck |