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These guys had no idea what they were getting into.

The caves of the Ecuadorian Amazon are full of tayos, those birds in whose empty eyes it is not hard to imagine hell or its terrestrial equivalent: the decaying expanse of jungle that propitiates dissipation and disappointment, where only the dregs are likely to prosper. The Ecuadoran jungle sounded like just the ticket.

I had left too many tracks in too many places. It came just as I had decided I needed to flee the country, because no place in it seemed safe for me. This was my introduction to Ecuador, which I had never heard of before. I picked up the notebook dropped by the geologist who was recovering next to me in the infirmary of the drilling platform off the Louisiana coast, and I read that passage in his diary.

He takes refuge in the language of science, but this proves insufficient, and he finally abandons it. None of Humboldt’s writing succeeds in describing the terror he felt on witnessing the hunt, the impaling, and the subsequent conversion of the birds into torches. The sustained and steady light will illuminate the men’s nocturnal excursions. As night falls, after impaling the birds, the men set them on fire. In the German naturalist’s description, the tayos’ faces resemble those of aged children and the empty sockets of their eyes are only slightly less disturbing than the spearing of their chicks that follows. Then the men hurl themselves at the birds, but seizing them is not easy because they are slippery as greased pigs and the floor of the cave tilts abruptly toward an abyss. This bewilders the tayos, blind birds with oily plumage, who are extremely sensitive to sound.

As they penetrate the cave, the men bang together enormous river-bottom rocks and shake rattles made of dried animal hooves. In his account of traveling along the Orinoco, Humboldt describes a strange ritual in which the native people go into the depths of a cave to catch birds with pitch-black feathers that they call tayos.