| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: along with it the labours of the field. It is not for nothing that
you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain habitations. A
clock and an almanac, you would fancy, were indispensable in such a
life. . .
CHAPTER VII - RANDOM MEMORIES: ROSA QUO LOCORUM
THROUGH what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
consciousness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it should
be not only interesting but instructive to inquire. A matter of
curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science to-morrow.
From the mind of childhood there is more history and more philosophy
to be fished up than from all the printed volumes in a library. The
|
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: had they done that we would not have done in their place? God,
what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible,
just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only
a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities,
star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!
They had
crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped
and roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city
brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days
as we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellows in
fabled depths of blackness they had never seen - and what had
At the Mountains of Madness |
