I will tell you something else, King, which may be a surprise for you. It will not happen for hundreds of years, but both of us are to come back.

The fisherman fishes as the urchin eats cream buns, from lust.

If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?

You think education is something to be done when all else fails?

My boy, you shall be everything in the world, animal, vegetable, mineral, protista, or virus, for all I care-before I have done with you-but you will have to trust my superior backsight. The time is not yet ripe for you to be a hawk... so you may as well sit down for the moment and learn to be a human being.

Were they, for some purpose almost too cunning for belief, only disguised as themselves?

You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn.