A popular thing for men to say when talking about how the transmission dropped out of their car, or how their favorite horse lost by a nose at Laurel, or that their mother-in-law is coming for a two-week vacation, is "Well, hell." The very expression denotes a certain weary acceptance of a sad fate, as in, "What can you do?"
In the al-Mahra province of Yemen, there is a sinkhole figuratively full of broken down Chevrolets, losing horses, and the vacation plans of mothers-in-law that is known as the "Well Of Hell." It's a crater 98 feet wide and 367 feet deep. It's been there for centuries, but has never been explored. The locals stay away, believing the hole to be a prison for jinn, the shape-shifting spirits from ancient Arabian folklore.
As legend has it, anyone who dares descend into the Well Of Hell might get swallowed whole, cursed with bad luck, or forced to attend an Adele concert. But recently, geology professor geology professor Mohammed al-Kindi and seven others from the Omani Caves Exploration Team rappelled down there for a looky-loo. Two others waited at the tops of the ropes.
What they found was, 30-foot high stalagmites and bright green cave pearls, waterfalls where flowed torrents of subterranean liquid from 150 feet above, and colonies of snakes, beetles, frogs, and birds that have been thriving for all these years!
They encountered no evil spirits, at least, not as far as they know. No one knows how this sinkhole formed in the first place, but the research team came back with samples to test.
And maybe the reports of a Hell on earth were overblown. "All we saw was pure freshwater down there,” said al-Kindi. “We even drank an entire bottle, and nothing happened to us!”
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