| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: But the words to her thought came quickly. The echo of the scream
had not ceased to ring on the air when there came the reaction,
and she sank on her knees on the floor in an agony of abasement.
Pulling her beautiful hair over her face, as the leper of old
his mantle, she wailed out.
"Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh!
I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until
the Judgement Day."
They all paused. I had thrown myself beside her in an agony
of helpless grief, and putting my arms around held her tight.
For a few minutes our sorrowful hearts beat together,
Dracula |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: The undergrowth was thick in this part; I couldn't see before my
nose, and must burst my way through by main force and ply the knife
as I went, slicing the cords of the lianas and slashing down whole
trees at a blow. I call them trees for the bigness, but in truth
they were just big weeds, and sappy to cut through like carrot.
From all this crowd and kind of vegetation, I was just thinking to
myself, the place might have once been cleared, when I came on my
nose over a pile of stones, and saw in a moment it was some kind of
a work of man. The Lord knows when it was made or when deserted,
for this part of the island has lain undisturbed since long before
the whites came. A few steps beyond I hit into the path I had been
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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 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies'
wings, the strokes of the water spiders' legs, like oars
which had lifted their boat -- all these made audible
music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the
rush of its body parting the water.
He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a
moment the visible world seemed to wheel slowly round,
himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge, the fort,
the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the
two privates, his executioners. They were in silhouette
against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated,
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
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 Lin McLean by Owen Wister: the railing that fenced him and his apparatus from the laity; and some
fifteen strategic minutes passed before all parties had crawled forth to
an understanding, and the message was written and paid for and
comfortably despatched. The agent was an honest creature, but of tame
habits, sent for the sake of his imperfect lungs to this otherwise
inappropriate air. He had lived chiefly in mid-West towns, a serious
reader of our comic weeklies; hence the apparition of Wiggin and the
Virginian had reminded him sickeningly of bandits. He had express money
in the safe, he explained to them, and this was a hard old country,
wasn't it? and did they like good whiskey?
They drank his whiskey, but it was not well to have mentioned that about
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