| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: of the terrace. He looked down upon her quivering at his feet, and
felt a kind of joy on seeing her suffer for his divinity whom he
himself could not wholly embrace. The birds were already singing, a
cold wind was blowing, and little clouds were drifting in the paling
sky.
Suddenly he perceived on the horizon, behind Tunis, what looked like
slight mists trailing along the ground; then these became a great
curtain of dust extending perpendicularly, and, amid the whirlwinds of
the thronging mass, dromedaries' heads, lances and shields appeared.
It was the army of the Barbarians advancing upon Carthage.
CHAPTER IV
Salammbo |
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 A Princess of Parms by Edgar Rice Burroughs: of radium powder. The moment the sunlight, even though
diffused, strikes this powder it explodes with a violence which
nothing can withstand. If you ever witness a night battle
you will note the absence of these explosions, while the
morning following the battle will be filled at sunrise with the
sharp detonations of exploding missiles fired the preceding
night. As a rule, however, non-exploding projectiles are used
at night."1
While I was much interested in Dejah Thoris' explanation
of this wonderful adjunct to Martian warfare, I was more
concerned by the immediate problem of their treatment of
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