| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: courage in both hands. "Where is she bound?" he asked.
"O, we're just looking in at all these miserable islands here,"
said the officer. "Then we bear up for San Francisco."
"O, yes, you're from China ways, like us?" pursued Wicks.
"Hong Kong," said the officer, and spat over the side.
Hong Kong. Then the game was up; as soon as they set foot on
board, they would be seized; the wreck would be examined, the
blood found, the lagoon perhaps dredged, and the bodies of the
dead would reappear to testify. An impulse almost
incontrollable bade Carthew rise from the thwart, shriek out
aloud, and leap overboard; it seemed so vain a thing to
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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 The Call of the Wild by Jack London: remained there the whole trip. The men rode and ran by turn, and
the dogs were kept on the jump, with but infrequent stoppages.
The Thirty Mile River was comparatively coated with ice, and they
covered in one day going out what had taken them ten days coming
in. In one run they made a sixty-mile dash from the foot of Lake
Le Barge to the White Horse Rapids. Across Marsh, Tagish, and
Bennett (seventy miles of lakes), they flew so fast that the man
whose turn it was to run towed behind the sled at the end of a
rope. And on the last night of the second week they topped White
Pass and dropped down the sea slope with the lights of Skaguay and
of the shipping at their feet.
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