it was not unusual to stumble upon him late at night in the kitchen , seated at the table examining a catalan guide to bee-keeping in the pyrenees , or poring over a barcelona bus schedule , or puzzling over the diagrams of the compressed-air braking systems detailed in the french railway engineers manual for the maintenance of sncf rolling stock , or even trying to decipher the arcane terminology of a nineteenth-century portuguese cotton buyers guide subtitled , a handbook for the understanding of the different modalities employed in the countries of india , angola and brazil .