What did Humboldt’s account describe inside the Guacharo cavern?
In The World of Wonders, the account is explicitly attributed to Humboldt’s Travels in South America. It leads a first-time reader along a riverbed through a green valley to a cave mouth described as an arch more than seventy feet high[1][2]. Vegetation fringes the river at the entrance, then thins as daylight fades; farther in, the birds’ cries grow into a din that echoes from the walls in darkness[3][4]. About half a mile in, the river forms a cascade; overhead, the book places the birds’ nests in holes in the roof, roughly sixty feet above the visitors[5][6].
The book also reports that local people entered with long poles at midsummer to gather fat from the young birds. That practice explains the cave’s name, rendered there as “the mine of fat”; it is context for the account, not a spectacle in itself[7][8].
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