Today's Stichomancy for Antonio Banderas

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas:

age, do you think the count is really what he appears to be?"

"What does he appear to be?"

"Why, you have just said, -- a man of high distinction."

"I told you, my dear mother, he was esteemed such."

"But what is your own opinion, Albert?"

"I must tell you that I have not come to any decided opinion respecting him, but I think him a Maltese."

"I do not ask you of his origin but what he is."

"Ah, what he is; that is quite another thing. I have seen so many remarkable things in him, that if you would have me

The Count of Monte Cristo

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Barlaam and Ioasaph by St. John of Damascus:

immortality and appointed sovran over everything upon earth; and from man he made woman, to be an helpmeet of like nature for him.

"And he planted a garden eastward in Eden, full of delight and all heart's ease, and set thereto the man whom he had formed, and commanded him freely to eat of all the heavenly trees therein, but forbade him wholly the taste of a certain one which was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus saying, 'In the day that ye eat thereof ye shall surely die.' But one of the aforesaid angel powers, the marshall of one host, though he bore in himself no trace of natural evil from his Maker's hand but had been created for good, yet by his own free and deliberate

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad:

just as it was told to me - but unfortunately robbed of the striking effect of the narrator; the most imposing old ruffian that ever followed the unromantic trade of master stevedore in the port of London.

Oct. 1910.

THE INN OF THE TWO WITCHES - A FIND

This tale, episode, experience - call it how you will - was related in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad age - unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game

Within the Tides

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 Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad:

I saw the vague figures of the watch grouped in the waist, gazing in awed silence.

"Are you going on, sir?" inquired an unsteady voice at my elbow.

I ignored it. I had to go on.

"Keep her full. Don't check her way. That won't do now," I said warningly.

"I can't see the sails very well," the helmsman answered me, in strange, quavering tones.

Was she close enough? Already she was, I won't say in the shadow of the land, but in the very blackness of it, already swallowed up as it were, gone too close to be recalled, gone from me altogether.

The Secret Sharer