| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: we entered after investigating the monstrous graves, had something
to reveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts
of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the improvised
table. Indeed, we had already realized that one of the six imperfect
and insanely buried things we had found - the one with the trace
of a peculiarly hateful odor - must represent the collected sections
of the entity which Lake had tried to analyze. On and around that
laboratory table were strewn other things, and it did not take
long for us to guess that those things were the carefully though
oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I
shall spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the
 At the Mountains of Madness |
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 Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: were accustomed to decide the future of Europe every morning in a few
fashionable phrases, chose to see in the stranger some great criminal,
the possessor of enormous wealth. Novelists described the old man's
life and gave some really interesting details of the atrocities
committed by him while he was in the service of the Prince of Mysore.
Bankers, men of a more positive nature, devised a specious fable.
"Bah!" they would say, shrugging their broad shoulders pityingly,
"that little old fellow's a /Genoese head/!"
"If it is not an impertinent question, monsieur, would you have the
kindness to tell me what you mean by a Genoese head?"
"I mean, monsieur, that he is a man upon whose life enormous sums
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