Today's Stichomancy for Ridley Scott

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Old Indian Legends by Zitkala-Sa:

water? He swims faster than I could ever run! That is what he has done. He has laughed at me for carrying a weight on my back while he shot hither like an arrow!"

Crying thus to himself, Iktomi stepped to the water's brink. He stooped forward with a hand on each bent knee and peeped far into the deep water.

"There!" he exclaimed, "I see you, my friend, sitting with your ankles wound around my little pot of fish! My friend, I am hungry. Give me a bone!"

"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the water-man, the muskrat. The sound did not rise up out of the lake, for it came down from overhead.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas:

are our prisoner."

And both extended their hands as if to seize the king, but before they could touch him with the tips of their fingers, both had fallen, one dead, the other stunned.

Aramis had passed his sword through the body of the first and Athos had knocked down the other with the butt end of his pistol.

Then, as Lord Leven and the other chieftains recoiled before this unexpected rescue, which seemed to come from Heaven for the prince they already thought was their prisoner, Athos and Aramis dragged the king from the perjured assembly into

Twenty Years After

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

'T was no maiden that you sighed for, 'T was the prairie dandelion That through all the dreamy Summer You had gazed at with such longing, You had sighed for with such passion, And had puffed away forever, Blown into the air with sighing. Ah! deluded Shawondasee! Thus the Four Winds were divided Thus the sons of Mudjekeewis Had their stations in the heavens,

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 Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner:

trees, and nuts and insects, such as we never see here; but after a little while I never looked at them--I was too tired.

"I ate as much as I could, and then lay down on my face under the wagon till the boy came to wake me to inspan, and then we drove on again all night; so it went, so it went. I think sometimes when I walked by my oxen I called to them in my sleep, for I know I thought of nothing; I was like an animal. My body was strong and well to work, but my brain was dead. If you have not felt it, Lyndall, you cannot understand it. You may work, and work, and work, till you are only a body, not a soul. Now, when I see one of those evil-looking men that come from Europe--navvies, with the beast- like, sunken face, different from any Kaffer's--I know what brought that