| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: privilege of over-looking the Queen Mother's Gardens."
It was that speech, uttered with beaming aplomb at a dinner-
table surrounded by the cosmopolitan nobility of the Eternal
City, that had suddenly revealed to Lansing the profound change
in the Hicks point of view.
As he looked back over the four months since he had so
unexpectedly joined the Ibis at Genoa, he saw that the change,
at first insidious and unperceived, dated from the ill-fated day
when the Hickses had run across a Reigning Prince on his
travels.
Hitherto they had been proof against such perils: both Mr. and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: kinder than I can bear to think of.' She said this with
unusual emotion; and, at the same time, sealed the envelope.
'Ah!' she cried, 'I have shut my letter! It is not quite
courteous; and yet, as between friends, it is perhaps better
so. I introduce you, after all, into a family secret; and
though you and I are already old comrades, you are still
unknown to my uncle. You go then to this address, Richard
Street, Glasgow; go, please, as soon as you arrive; and give
this letter with your own hands into those of Miss
Fonblanque, for that is the name by which she is to pass.
When we next meet, you will tell me what you think of her,'
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: distant thickets. I had thought I saw - no! I did see, with my own
eyes, vast colossal forms moving amongst the trees. They were
gigantic animals; it was a herd of mastodons - not fossil remains,
but living and resembling those the bones of which were found in the
marshes of Ohio in 1801. I saw those huge elephants whose long,
flexible trunks were grouting and turning up the soil under the trees
like a legion of serpents. I could hear the crashing noise of their
long ivory tusks boring into the old decaying trunks. The boughs
cracked, and the leaves torn away by cartloads went down the
cavernous throats of the vast brutes.
So, then, the dream in which I had had a vision of the prehistoric
Journey to the Center of the Earth |
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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: of him as a surgeon in Charles V.'s army. He saw, most probably,
the Emperor's invasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from
before Montmorency's fortified camp at Avignon, through a country in
which that crafty general had destroyed every article of human food,
except the half-ripe grapes. He saw, perhaps, the Spanish soldiers,
poisoned alike by the sour fruit and by the blazing sun, falling in
hundreds along the white roads which led back into Savoy, murdered
by the peasantry whose homesteads had been destroyed, stifled by the
weight of their own armour, or desperately putting themselves, with
their own hands, out of a world which had become intolerable. Half
the army perished. Two thousand corpses lay festering between Aix
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