"Then I'll tell you. I _want_ to write this book. I want to write it as Cheops made his Pyramid, as Moses made his Decalogue--to last for ever. If I can't write it no living man can. Why? Because no living man combines in himself what I combine--the ripest and fullest store of knowledge and experience and all the irresistible recklessness and belief of youth at the same time. Here I stand, between the two, and if I can only stay so I shall write--I shall write--oh, such a book as never was dreamed of! So I've got to stand still just where I am now. I haven't got to budge from thirty-three--that, as nearly as I can tell from myself, is the age I am now. You see----" Uneasily I began to wish myself elsewhere. I knew that I began to be afraid in his presence; it is an eerie thing to hear a man deliberately proposing to manipulate his age. The man down below continued to wash the car; I heard the clank of his bucket, the rushing of his hose. "Thirty-three," he continued, his eyes still glittering with the excitement of it. "If I can only stay so for six months nothing matters after that! God, just for six months!... But it's not so easy as it sounds, George. You've got to be on the watch every moment. As long as you're moving the thing's simple enough; it's when you try to stop that it's like trying to stand still on a bicycle. Wait, I'll show you. Push that table over. And if you don't mind I'll turn down the gas." It was not the heavy-legged Victorian table he wanted me to push over, but the one on which our glasses of lemonade stood, a flimsy affair of bamboo and wicker, hardly more than eighteen inches square. He rose, turned the yellow incandescent down to a glimmer, drew the table up before us, and brought the electric torch from his pocket. He began to speak with very much more volubility, very much less care. "The line of that table-edge is what I want you to keep your mind on," he began. "Never mind any other dimension. You'll get the idea presently. I want you to imagine that edge a scale of years, with the higher numbers at your end and the lower ones at mine. You're to imagine that, and then you're to imagine that this lamp's my mind, me, my faculties, whatever you like to call it. You'll get on to it presently. Now watch." The torch was not of the stick-pattern, but of the flask type with a wider angle. In the middle of the table's edge he made a minute notch with his nail. A foot or so of the split-bamboo edge was illuminated, with this notch in the middle of it.