| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: we plunged into the town itself, clambering over fallen masonry
and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height
of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again
became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained.
Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively
irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp - which I
resented all the more because I could not help sharing certain
conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival
from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his imagination,
too; for in one place - where a debris-littered alley turned a
sharp corner - he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground
At the Mountains of Madness |
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 Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: never been heard to sing more than two or three times since she came
to Paris. She receives much company, but goes nowhere."
The Observer speaks, you will notice, as an Oracle. His words,
anecdotes, and quotations must be accepted as truths, under pain of
being thought without social education or intelligence, and of causing
him to slander you with much zest in twenty salons where he is
considered indispensable. The Observer is forty years of age, never
dines at home, declares himself no longer dangerous to women, wears a
maroon coat, and has a place reserved for him in several boxes at the
"Bouffons." He is sometimes confounded with the Parasite; but he has
filled too many real functions to be thought a sponger; moreover he
|
