'it was a great joy, christmas time was', mr. Rosario said into the microphone, reminiscing about when neighbours would gather to sing the 'jinjri nona' and dance to the sound of guitars, violins and harmonium. that day, back in 2007, mr. Rosario glowed. he seemed genuinely delighted to finally speak his mother tongue again, even to a complete stranger who had just shown up on his doorstep, clumsily trying to explain how he'd heard a rumour that the last speaker of creole portuguese in the whole of cochin might live there. mr. Rosario confirmed: that he was, yes, to the best of his knowledge, ever since his friend mr. Paynter had passed away a few years earlier.
that day, back in 2007, mr. Rozario showed no sign of discomfort. the next day, however, he was in intense pain from his back, and it rhythmically broke his voice while he apologised for not being able to help me with my recordings.
that day, back in 2007, i was immediately touched by the warmth of mr. Rosario's welcome and the easy smile of his family. three years and a few letters later, when i returned to their vypeen cottage, i was treated like an old friend and shown right through to the Rosarios' dinner table. their remarkable generosity, i could see, was still vital, and so was mr. Rosario's patience: he agreed to spend nearly a week teaching me about that language he alone carried around.
that was last january. and now, late at night, an email (how unfittingly prosaic!) arrives announcing that 'Mr William expired on the 20 of August at 1.15 am'.
i cannot find the right register to simultaneously report the demise of a kind friend and the death of a language: one is worthy of primal grief, the other probably requires cool and composed factuality. but i mourn the two. mr. Rosario is gone, leaving his family and friends lonelier. and gone is also the mother tongue of five centuries' worth of cochin families, modest witness to an encounter which changed the order of the world. leaving us all that much poorer. and i will leave it at that. silence now.
early in the morning, under a slight drizzle, we set foot on the high trail of the tiger leaping gorge, where the chinese west starts clambering towards himalaya and the secretive tibetan plateau. the yangtze, increasingly below, roars greenishly along.
num desafio ao pulmão carbonizado, o trilho vai subindo de curva em contracurva - devagar devagarinho, está bem de ver, que a perna também se urbanizou - e a cada passo vai deixando para trás os vestígios das gentes e os derradeiros arrozais.
ahead of us, across the water, the cliff gradually straightens up into an immense black wall, pushing head first into the cloud cover. on our gentler side, a sudden twist of the trail reveals tiny hamlets in the distance.
uma vez lá chegados, damos conta de que em torno das eiras vazias circula finalmente alguma vida. vida animal, já que, ao que parece, a de outro género está concentrada no restaurante da aldeia a engolir sopa de fitas.
goats - those elusive things - occasionally rain down from the steep cliffs along the road, as carelessly as one might glide down sand dunes for a leisurely dip in the sea.
o vento ganha pujança, o que nestas serranias não parece incomum. apesar de nos salpicar com os ribeiros que descem a encosta e nos obrigar, volta e meia, a agarrar os pedregulhos do caminho em busca de estabilidade, tem pelo menos o condão de dissipar as nuvens.
as the clouds part, we can finally see where the black fortress ends. jade dragon snow mountain. jade, to be fair, is nowhere to be seen, and the dragon did not make an appearance; but the white matter drizzled on top rescues the wisdom of the namers.
vindo o lusco-fusco, é tempo de arranjar um abrigo e trocar historietas com os camaradas caminheiros. e cama. de madrugada, com um chá de gengibre entre as mãos, observamos a respiração do rio a trepar a montanha.
as we stand watching the yangtze slowly carve the gorge, very close to where the proverbial tiger leapt across it, a series of explosions go off around the corner. the trail, it appears, now joins a road under violent construction. soon, we hear, it will allow coaches to cart mass tourism into this wilderness. 
as for us, low-income sweating trekkers who are too early to enjoy the delights of modernity, it would be wiser to roll down to the river bank as quickly as possible, find the ferry crossing and drive back to lijiang. there is more to see elsewhere, and this stretch of the gorge has been corrupted just a tad too much.
