A caver abseiling down the Barhout properly, a sinkhole identified as the “Well of Hell” (AFP)
A group of Omani cavers has made what is believed to be the initial descent to the bottom of Yemen’s fabled Well of Barhout — a all-natural wonder shunned by a lot of locals, who think it is a prison for genies.
The forbidding ‘Well of Hell’, whose dark, round aperture creates a 30-metre (one hundred foot) wide hole in the desert floor of Yemen’s eastern province of Al-Mahra, plunges about 112 metres (367 feet) under the surface and, according to some accounts, offers off strange odours.
Inside, the Oman Cave Exploration Team (OCET) identified snakes, dead animals and cave pearls — but no indicators of the supernatural.
“There were snakes, but they won’t bother you unless you bother them,” Mohammed al-Kindi, a geology professor at the German University of Technology in Oman, told AFP.
Kindi was amongst eight skilled cavers who rappelled down last week, even though two colleagues remained at the surface.
Footage offered to AFP showed cave formations and grey and lime-green cave pearls, formed by dripping water.
“Passion drove us to do this, and we felt that this is something that will reveal a new wonder and part of Yemeni history,” mentioned Kindi, who also owns a mining and petroleum consultancy firm.
“We collected samples of water, rocks, soil and some dead animals but have yet to have them analysed,” he mentioned, adding that a report will quickly be made public.
“There were dead birds, which does create some bad odours, but there was no overwhelming bad smell.”
Yemeni officials told AFP in June that they did not know what lay in the depths of the pit, which they estimated to be “millions and millions” of years old, adding that they had under no circumstances reached the bottom.
“We have gone to visit the area and entered the well, reaching more than 50-60 metres down,” Salah Babhair, director common of Mahra’s geological survey and mineral sources authority, mentioned at the time.
“We noticed strange things inside. We also smelled something strange… It’s a mysterious situation.”
Over the centuries, stories have circulated of malign figures identified as jinns or genies living in the properly, which some regard as the gate of hell.
Many residents of the region are uneasy about going to the vast pit or even speaking about it, for worry of ill fortune.
Yemenis have had sufficient undesirable luck as it is.
The nation has been embroiled in a devastating civil war because 2014 that has triggered what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with two-thirds of its 30-million population dependent on some kind of help.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Spuzz employees and is published from a syndicated feed.)