Majlis Al Jinn is the third largest cave chamber in the world. The three openings in its towering roof, the only ways in or out, resulted from cave-ins of the karst limestone rock forming the ceiling of the chamber, and the two largest of these have left rubble and boulders piled on the floor of two corners of the chamber, too far down to be seen from above. The third opening is a small fracture in the limestone roof of the cave forming a chimney about 5-6 meters across and 15 meters deep. From the top of the chimney, the chamber plunges 178 meters through awesome spaciousness to the dusty floor below.

Discoveries

Majlis Al Jinn is one of several sink holes at 1200-1400 meters altitude in the Jebel Bani Jaber mountains between wadis Shab and Nam in Oman. This fascinating area is the site of many recent discoveries. Majlis Al Jinn itself was discovered in 1983 by Don Davidson, a geologist who was for fifteen years on the payroll of the Omani government for work entailing tasks as onerous as hiking, exploring, and abseiling.

As recently as 1991, a dozen impressive 3000 year-old bronze-age tombs were discovered nearby. Standing like sentinels along a ridge overlooking rippling folds of rockscape, the tombs were built from chunks of limestone that litter the land. The rough-hewn stones were cleverly stacked to form a domed chamber surmounted by a chimney. The best examples stand some 1ten meters tall, with the outer layers of rock remarkably well coined. The inner layers are not coined, and the rough surfaces can be climbed only with difficulty, as they slope inward to form the chimney. The climber, pulling him or herself up from rock to rock, cannot help but be impressed at the structural integrity of the tombs, whose builders carefully set each unmortared stone in place, preventing for millennia the collapse that would ensue if any stones could be dislodged by the climber.

The tombs can be reached by a new dirt road bulldozed out of the escarpment. The trip takes 4 to 6 hours from Muscat, depending on driving day or night and condition of the road. The last set of tombs occupies a spot of level ground with a panoramic view which, despite the chill wind at that altitude, is much favored by campers, as there is no suitable spot for camping in the inhospitable terrain between there and the jumping off point for the Majlis area, ten kilometers away, at the end of a tortuous road leading to a village whose inhabitants migrate summers, leaving their village eerily deserted, except for flies and hornets. People visiting the tombs often drive to the village and hike into the sink hole area from the end of the road.

Majlis Al Jinn itself was mentioned in a recent issue of Oman Today, but because the article failed to give instructions on how to find it, few who come this far reach that particular spot. Still, it shouldn't be that difficult to find. Basically, you go north, heading into the wadi where you have left your car. After only ten minutes walking, in order to continue north, you have to climb up the hill at the end of the wadi. If you're sharp-eyed, you'll find a faint trail leading up the rocks. From the top, you see a level plain further north. The trail to the left leads to the plain, but either direction going north will get you there.

After crossing a series of rock-strewn wadis fairly typical of Oman, you descend into the plain, where you can easily see white stones marking a runway that must have served earlier geological expeditions. Here, it is a relief to walk for a few minutes on smooth ground, unhindered by boulders. A well-trod trail continues north, perpendicular to the head of the runway. From this area, you can see a mushroom-shaped tree atop a ridge, again to the north, and Majlis Al Jinn is right there, just to the north of that. It will take you about an hour to walk there from the airfield.

Perhaps a better analogy for what holds the roof over Majlis Al Jinn in place is a gothic cathedral. Imagine the largest gothic cathedral you can, with stones set into flying buttresses in such a way that each supports the other, a fact that can be appreciated by standing on the floor of such a cathedral and looking up at the ceiling towering overhead, and being thankful that whatever is supporting those stones, they are not falling down on you, nor have they fallen on anyone for centuries. But to appreciate the scale of Majlis Al Jinn, one has to think bigger than a cathedral. With only slight alteration, you could fit the Great Pyramid of Giza inside the Majlis. The pyramid is short enough to fit, only 147 meters, but its base is 236 meters, about the same as Majlis Al Jinn, whose immense floor measures 225 by 300. I'm not sure how high the Astrodome in Houston is, but its dome measures 195 meters at its base, so it may be a comparable, if slightly smaller, structure. If you've ever climbed or taken an elevator halfway up the Eiffel Tower and verged on vertigo while enjoying the panoramic views of Paris, then you might have been at around 178 meters, because the Eiffel Tower is 400 meters tall, including its antenna. The drop into Majlis Al Jinn covers approximately half the height of the Empire State Building in New York City, which stands at 381 meters tall.