| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Sucked out of him, and saw the tower flash by
And the small tree swell beneath him . . .
He patted his boy on the head, and kissed his wife,
Looked quickly around the room, to remember it,--
And so went out . . . For once, he forgot his pail.
Something had changed--but it was not the street--
The street was just the same--it was himself.
Puddles flashed in the sun. In the pawn-shop door
The same old black cat winked green amber eyes;
The butcher stood by his window tying his apron;
The same men walked beside him, smoking pipes,
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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 Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: it was all wrong. I know it now, and how far we were from
guessing the wonderful, the miraculous, the gigantic truth which
even yet I may only guess at--the thing that sets Caspak apart
from all the rest of the world far more definitely than her
isolated geographical position or her impregnable barrier of
giant cliffs. If I could live to return to civilization, I
should have meat for the clergy and the layman to chew upon for
years--and for the evolutionists, too.
After breakfast the men set out to hunt, while the women went to
a large pool of warm water covered with a green scum and filled
with billions of tadpoles. They waded in to where the water was
The Land that Time Forgot |
