The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: there,--I call him Toil. The hoe, our sole property, has never left
our hands. Let it be the old lords or the present taxes which take the
best of our earnings, the fact remains that we sweat our lives out in
toil."
"But you could undertake a business, and try to make your fortune,"
said Blondet.
"Try to make my fortune! And where shall I try? If I wish to leave my
own province, I must get a passport, and that costs forty sous. Here's
forty years that I've never had a slut of a forty-sous piece jingling
against another in my pocket. If you want to travel you need as many
crowns as there are villages, and there are mighty few Fourchons who
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: It was now four o'clock, and we had gone four Icelandic miles, or
twenty-four English miles.
In that place the fiord was at least three English miles wide; the
waves rolled with a rushing din upon the sharp-pointed rocks; this
inlet was confined between walls of rock, precipices crowned by sharp
peaks 2,000 feet high, and remarkable for the brown strata which
separated the beds of reddish tuff. However much I might respect the
intelligence of our quadrupeds, I hardly cared to put it to the test
by trusting myself to it on horseback across an arm of the sea.
If they are as intelligent as they are said to be, I thought, they
won't try it. In any case, I will tax my intelligence to direct
 Journey to the Center of the Earth |