| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: "I saw them as he stooped by me to put that coffee you sent to me
on the table. And his eyes shine in the dark."
By this time Montgomery had recovered from the surprise of my question.
"I always thought," he said deliberately, with a certain
accentuation of his flavouring of lisp, "that there was something
the matter with his ears, from the way he covered them.
What were they like?"
I was persuaded from his manner that this ignorance was a pretence.
Still, I could hardly tell the man that I thought him a liar.
"Pointed," I said; "rather small and furry,--distinctly furry.
But the whole man is one of the strangest beings I ever set
The Island of Doctor Moreau |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Witch, et. al by Anton Chekhov: repeats the sound of every footstep that he takes.
The peasants called up a picture of a free life such as they had
never lived; whether they vaguely recalled the images of stories
heard long ago or whether notions of a free life had been handed
down to them with their flesh and blood from far-off free
ancestors, God knows!
The first to break the silence was Nikandr Sapozhnikov, who had
not till then let fall a single word. Whether he envied the
tramp's transparent happiness, or whether he felt in his heart
that dreams of happiness were out of keeping with the grey fog
and the dirty brown mud -- anyway, he looked sternly at the tramp
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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 American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: desire to hide my face in a napkin and grin. Then, according to
rule, they produced their dead, and across the snowy table-cloths
dragged the corpse of every man slain in the Civil War, and
hurled defiance at "our natural enemy" (England, so please you),
"with her chain of fortresses across the world." Thereafter they
glorified their nation afresh from the beginning, in case any
detail should have been overlooked, and that made me
uncomfortable for their sakes. How in the world can a white man,
a sahib, of our blood, stand up and plaster praise on his own
country? He can think as highly as he likes, but this
open-mouthed vehemence of adoration struck me almost as
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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 Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: weekly bills, which yet, I have reason to be assured, never gave a full
account, by many thousands; the confusion being such, and the carts
working in the dark when they carried the dead, that in some places
no account at all was kept, but they worked on, the clerks and sextons
not attending for weeks together, and not knowing what number they
carried. This account is verified by the following bills of mortality: -
Of all of the
Diseases. Plague
From August 8 to August 15 5319 3880
" " 15 " 22 5568 4237
" " 22 " 29 7496 6102
A Journal of the Plague Year |
