| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey: arrow. Wingenund's heart is sore. The day of the redman is gone. His sun is
setting. Wingenund feels already the gray shades of evening."
He stopped one long moment as if to gather breath for his final charge to his
listeners. Then with a magnificent gesture he thundered:
"Is the Delaware a fool? When Wingenund can cross unarmed to the Big Water he
shall change his mind. When Deathwind ceases to blow his bloody trail over the
fallen leaves Wingenund will believe."
Chapter XIII.
As the summer waned, each succeeding day, with its melancholy calm, its
changing lights and shades, its cool, damp evening winds, growing more and
more suggestive of autumn, the little colony of white people in the Village of
The Spirit of the Border |
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 Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: After a time the party returned to the court. Heavy, round bronze
lids, sunk in the stones of the pavement, covered the cisterns of the
palace. Vitellius noticed that one of these was larger than the
others, and that when struck by his foot it had not their sonority. He
struck them all, one after another; then stamped upon the ground and
shouted:
"I have found it! I have found the buried treasure of Herod!"
Searching for buried treasure was a veritable mania among the Romans.
The tetrarch swore that no treasure was hidden in that spot.
"What is concealed there, then?" the proconsul demanded.
"Nothing--that is, only a man--a prisoner."
Herodias |
