| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Out of Time's Abyss by Edgar Rice Burroughs: means of escape without detection, the Englishman decided to risk
whatever might lie beyond it, and so, boldly pushing it in, he
crossed the threshold and entered a small apartment.
As he did so, he heard a muffled ejaculation of surprise, and
turning his eyes in the direction from whence the sound had come,
he beheld a wide-eyed girl standing flattened against the
opposite wall, an expression of incredulity upon her face. At a
glance he saw that she was of no race of humans that he had come
in contact with since his arrival upon Caprona--there was no
trace about her form or features of any relationship to those low
orders of men, nor was she appareled as they--or, rather, she did
Out of Time's Abyss |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks - which he thought
he had shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below.
I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left - of what had
disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have
conceived the inconceivable - a wild trip across the monstrous
mountains and a descent into the unknown, primal masonry - But
we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything
definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely
noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness
from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead,
we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The
At the Mountains of Madness |
