The Greeks could not believe so divine a scent came from mere bark. So a story was told — and let to spread. Cinnamon, it was said, was gathered by a great bird that built its nest of the fragrant sticks upon cliffs no mortal could climb. To win the spice, men left great joints of meat below; the birds carried them up, the nests grew too heavy, and fell.

The Greeks named the creature the cinnamologus. The Egyptians knew it as the phoenix, which perfumes its own pyre and rises again from the ash. The truth was simpler, and far better kept. There was no bird. There was an island.

Understanding of this kind is not held in documents. It is held in hands. So he went to the southern districts — the warm wet country around Galle and Matara, at the edge of the Sinharaja rain, where the island makes the finest cinnamon in the world — and he stayed.

Not a visit. A stay. Long enough for the novelty to wear off and the real thing to show itself. He rose in the dark with the peelers and learned why the work begins before the heat does. He watched the curved brass knife go into a cut shoot and lift the inner bark away in sheets finer than paper — a motion that looks effortless and takes a decade to learn. He held quills at every grade until his fingers could tell Alba from C5 without his eyes.

He learned that a quill’s tightness is decided days before it looks like a quill at all, in how the sheets are laid one inside another. That the craft is carried in families, taught by proximity rather than instruction. That there is a vocabulary here spoken almost entirely with the hands.