Dams, Jjinns and the Jebel Top
A long climb up a rocky goat track took us to the Jebel top, and the tombs that have stood there almost for eternity. The air was like champagne and we sucked it in like thirsty men. The ride home was in the moonlight, along a rocky windy road, with Djinns flitting in the shadows beside the road. Read on, read on.....
Tombs on the Jebel Top, Oman
“Wanna come on a trip?’, asked big Clint, our drilling supervisor and hydrogeologist in his Montana drawl, as he hauled a scruffy photocopied sheet of paper out of his back pocket. They were the hand-written directions to some ancient tombs on a Jebel top, recently discovered, and definitely requiring a visit. And so, it came to pass – at four pm we piled into his Nissan Patrol and headed literally into the sunset. Now, these were the days when GPS technology was in its infancy, along with cell phone networks, so all we had were those hand-written directions to guide us on our adventure.
............................or directions to that effect
It really was a case of following the gravel track for 15.4 km, turning left at the tree, driving another 6.7 km, turning at the date palm plantation, driving 3.6 km, crossing the wadi, making a steep ascent up to the right, turn left on the goat track, start to climb, taking care not to drop your wheel off the edge, pass village on right after 4.1 km, or directions to that effect.
We were at the time drilling a dam site in a place called Wadi Al Tayeen and the rigs were churning out core unrelentingly which had to be logged, and then there were the lugeon tests to carry out, piezometers to install, and a drilling programme to manage. So to skive off for an afternoon was a rare privilege and I jumped at the chance of going on an Indiana Jones style adventure.
The goat track took us higher and higher
The tombs are located high on the jebel top at a place called Jaylah, which actually isn’t a place at all – just a high-altitude plateau of sun baked rock. We drove for kilometre after kilometre through wadis, over rocks and boulders, and ultimately found ourselves on a rocky goat track that carried us higher and higher into the mountain fastness of the Al Hajar. And as we climbed the temperature fell from somewhere in the mid-forties, to be replaced by cool, invigorating mountain air which we gulped down like cold champagne.
Grinding up that long, winding rocky goat path, we felt that we were on a grand adventure, which of course we were. Clint was forever grumbling about how he could never get used to the Arabian heat, and he was as happy as I was to wind down the windows and suck in lungful’s of relatively cool, 25-degree air.
My adventures into the other world
The day was well advanced when we eventually found our tombs – beautiful beehive structures with a hole at the base through which I was able to wriggle and take some pictures. The encircling stonework was open to the sky, simple, unadorned, and subject to a millennia of heat, dust and occasional rain. Clint couldn’t wriggle his large bulk through the tiny apertures so I had to report back on my adventures into the underworld. The Jebel itself was magnificent – a grand high desert, with the high Late Campanian/Maastrichian-Tertiary sedimentary cover stretching out to the sun-burnished horizon.
We climbed out of our twentieth-century time machine
And then it was time to go, for the westering sun was almost gone and there was a long, rocky, unfamiliar drive home. Pounding down that rocky goat track, our plans on getting home in time for supper were scuppered when we came upon a herd of sheep and goats, and then a wandering community of Bedouin. Unable to drive through that thronging mass of bleating goats, and unable to refuse an invitation for qahwah (coffee) we climbed out of our twentieth-century time machine and were ushered into a world little changed, or so it seemed to me, for over a thousand years.
Dire predictions of impending dysentery
The mountains of Oman, shrouded in a rare downpour that nearly washed us away.
Flickering shadows danced across the weather-beaten faces of nomadic tribesmen and fresh faces of the boys alike, while the dark silhouettes of the women and girls stood arrayed beyond the amber caress of the firelight, faces half covered, whilst goats butted their way unabashedly through the human circle or jumped expertly between the rocky outcrops, bleating incessantly. Qahwah was soon brewing in a traditional Arabian coffee pot, dates were produced, and there we sat, surrounded by wandering Bedouin, drinking coffee and trying to communicate in our broken Arabic, with Clint making occasional utterances to me along the lines of the coffee being made with frog-pond water, with dire predictions of impending dysentery.
Tales of the Arabian Nights
I thought I had just parachuted into the Tales of the Arabian Nights, and just when I thought my adventure could not get more perfect, a full moon heaved itself up above the eastern horizon to bathe us in its golden light, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Roll over Indiana Jones.
It was a long, pounding road home that night, in the sultry Arabian darkness, avoiding boulders, goats and wandering djinns who flitted in the dark shadows beside the moonlit road. We fell, exhausted, through the door of our flat-roofed house, hungry, thirsty but with the blood running quick in our veins and the light of adventure burning in our eyes.
We eventually drilled those holes
We eventually drilled all of those holes at the dam site, logged all of the cores, carried out the lugeon testing and kept ourselves out of trouble. And then I had to fly back to England, not on a magic carpet but in a Boeing 777, but I have never forgotten those Omani adventures, and a long winding road to the jebel top. The Omani ophiolite is a geological classic, comprising ocean floor and mantle which has been caught in the tectonic mill and now lies exposed under the blistering Arabian sun for geologists to inspect and ponder.
