| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: the mother seated herself, and taking out a long stocking of
mixed blue and white yarn, began to knit with briskness.
"Mary, thee'd better fill the kettle, hadn't thee?" gently
suggested the mother.
Mary took the kettle to the well, and soon reappearing,
placed it over the stove, where it was soon purring and steaming,
a sort of censer of hospitality and good cheer. The peaches,
moreover, in obedience to a few gentle whispers from Rachel, were
soon deposited, by the same hand, in a stew-pan over the fire.
Rachel now took down a snowy moulding-board, and, tying on
an apron, proceeded quietly to making up some biscuits, first saying
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
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: science - that we could not photograph these anomalous creatures,
we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on toward the
abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose
exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.
Not long
afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly
sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching
the tunnel mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins, and
heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious
open space which made us gasp involuntarily - a perfect inverted
hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully a hundred feet in
At the Mountains of Madness |
