| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: And sudden the hurricane wrack unrolls up the front of the sky,
At once the ship lies idle, the sails hang silent on high,
The breath of the wind that blew is blown out like the flame of a lamp,
And the silent armies of death draw near with inaudible tramp:
So sudden, the voice of her weeping ceased; in silence she rose
And passed from the house of her sorrow, a woman clothed with repose,
Carrying death in her breast and sharpening death with her hand.
Hither she went and thither in all the coasts of the land.
They tell that she feared not to slumber alone, in the dead of night,
In accursed places; beheld, unblenched, the ribbon of light (9)
Spin from temple to temple; guided the perilous skiff,
 Ballads |
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 At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through
which we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited
part of something of incalculable extent. The foothills were more
sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures, linking the
terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which
evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter, as well
as the queer cave mouths, were as thick on the inner as on the
outer sides of the mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted,
for the most part, of walls from ten to one hundred and fifty
feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five
 At the Mountains of Madness |