| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Betty Zane by Zane Grey: sisters, went on praising his friend.
Betty was confined to the house a week or more and during this enforced
idleness she had ample time for reflection and opportunity to inquire into the
perplexed state of her mind.
The small room, which Betty called her own, faced the river and fort. Most of
the day she lay by the window trying to read her favorite books, but often she
gazed out on the quiet scene, the rolling river, the everchanging trees and
the pastures in which the red and white cows grazed peacefully; or she would
watch with idle, dreamy eyes the flight of the crows over the hills, and the
graceful motion of the hawk as he sailed around and around in the azure sky,
looking like a white sail far out on a summer sea.
Betty Zane |
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 Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer: close beside the wound where his bullet had entered.
"The mark of Kali," he said. "The man was a phansigar--
a religious strangler. Since Fu-Manchu has dacoits in his
service I might have expected that he would have Thugs.
A group of these fiends would seem to have fled into Burma;
so that the mysterious epidemic in Rangoon was really an outbreak
of thuggee--on slightly improved lines! I had suspected something
of the kind but, naturally, I had not looked for Thugs near Rangoon.
My unexpected resistance led the strangler to bungle the rope.
You have seen how it was fastened about my throat?
That was unscientific. The true method, as practiced
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu |
