| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Twilight Land by Howard Pyle: The servant would rather have had the money in hand than the
magic pebble, but, as nothing better was to be had, he took the
little stone, and, bidding his master good-bye, trudged out into
the world, to seek his fortune. Well, he jogged on and on, paying
his way with the few pennies he had saved in his seven years of
service, but for all of his travelling nothing of good happened
to him until, one morning, he came to a lonely place where there
stood a gallows, and there he sat him down to rest, and it is
just in such an unlikely place as this that a man's best chance
of fortune comes to him sometimes.
As the servant sat there, there came two ravens flying, and lit
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: some thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut--"the
country lying at the back of something." In the maps that
desolate coast is written Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name
is best, because the country lies at the very back of everything
in the world. For nine months of the year there is only ice and
snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no one can realise
who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For six months
of those nine it is dark; and that is what makes it so horrible.
In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other
day and every night, and then the snow begins to weep off on the
southerly slopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly
The Second Jungle Book |
