It was the morning of September 15, 2021, and Mohammad Al-Kindi stood on the precipice of the great unknown. He and his Oman Cave Exploration Team were in the middle of the desert at the far eastern edge of Yemen near the border with Oman, a desolate spot far from any cities or major roads. As the sun rose, they peered down into a giant hole in the earth, some 100 feet wide at the surface, and extending downwards to a depth of, well, nobody was quite sure.
The hole was known as the Well of Barhout, and Al-Kindi and his team were preparing an attempt to become the first to rappel to its bottom.
Around them, a large group of locals had gathered. But these were not merely curious onlookers. As Al-Kindi and his team set up their equipment, the locals begged them not to go through with their expedition. Some in the crowd openly shook with fear.
Their apprehension was understandable. To locals, the Well of Barhout is known by an entirely different name – to them, it is the “Well of Hell,” and the legends surrounding this moniker are not something they take lightly. In fact, many consider it back luck to even speak about the well.
Local Stories About the Well of Barhout
According to locals, the well is a place of unexplained disappearances, where people seem to simply vanish into thin air. Many believe that objects near the hole can actually be sucked towards it. An often-recounted story tells of a shepherd who let her baby play in the area, only to find that the child had instantly disappeared, with no tracks left in the sand where it may have crawled towards the well.
Further, many have reported seeing strange animals around the well, including terrifying winged creatures much larger than men. Others have noted a foul, almost unbearable smell coming from it, while some even say they have heard strange voices and people screaming from deep below.
But perhaps what was giving people the most apprehension as they watched Al-Kindi and his team prepare to descend into the well, was a story, describing what had happened to another who had made such an attempt in the past.
According to locals, at a time when the region was suffering from severe drought, its citizens decided to tie a rope to a man and lower him into the well looking for water. As he descended, the man suddenly began to scream in terror, causing those at the surface to immediately lift him back out. But when they did, the lower half of his body was missing; the man had been severed at the waist.
It was no wonder that some begged Al-Kindi and his team not to enter the well.
This may all sound very dramatic, perhaps like type of urban legends which are built through generations by word of mouth and exaggeration. Except, the idea of the Barhout Well as a ‘Well of Hell’ is one deeply woven into the religious and historical fabric of the region…
Prophet Muhammad's Warning of The Well of Barhout
At the time of Prophet Muhammad, during the 7th century CE, an Islamic scribe named Ibn Abbas recorded the words of the prophet in a series of hadiths. In one of these hadiths, Muhammad speaks of the Well of Barhout.
“The worst water on the face of the earth is the water at Wadi Barhut in Hadramawt, which is like locusts in comparison with other pests. It gushes in the morning and is dry by the evening.”
In one sense, Muhammad’s words on the well have been taken literally. In fact, in modern times, a man named Ammar Hashem Mohammed Osman gained a kind of prominence with his his vivid descriptions of the region’s water, which he came across while completing compulsory military service in the area.
“There was an ordinary well dug to provide the military site with water. But when the pump started working for the first time to withdraw the water, a black liquid came out of the well like tar. The smell was unbearable, a bad smell like rotten eggs. I was nauseated by the severity of the smell.
No one could use the water for at least 12 hours, as the odor subsided and black matter was deposited on the pond walls where water was collected. Nevertheless, I swear that I was unable to sleep from the smell of my clothes and my body odor after washing with that water.
It is certain that this well is connected to the same source that feeds the water of Barhout Well and contains the same characteristics.”
On the other hand, like many words spoken by religious figures, Muhammad’s words on the Well of Barhout have also been taken more metaphorically.
Look at it like this: for those living in a desert, the idea of a well producing water “like locusts” would have been pretty much the worst thing imaginable. As such, when Muhammad says the Barhout Well has “the worst water on the face of the earth,” it can be seen as a metaphor for the worst place on earth.
This idea formed the foundation of the legend of the Well of Barhout.
Historical Accounts of The Well of Barhout
In the 13th century, a Muslim traveler and historian by the name of Ibu al-Mujawir wrote about how the Barhout Well had come into being. He attributed its construction to the infamous King Shaddad bin Ad, who ruled over the Arabian Peninsula in the time after the flood of Noah. For Muslims, Shaddad is remembered as a tyrant and infidel, and, more broadly, as the builder of the legendary lost city of Iram, which many say is still buried under the desert sand to this day – an “Atlantis of the Sands.”
According to Ibn al-Mijawir, Shaddad had come to eastern Yemen during the course of expanding his kingdom and found it desolate and without water. Therefore, he ordered two captive jinns under his command to dig a great system of wells and channels.
In Islamic tradition, the jinn are supernatural beings created by God from “smokeless fire.” They have the capacity for both good and evil, and often appear to humans in animal form, particularly as snakes and birds, or even as humans, while also leading their own lives in a separate dimension known as Al Ghaib.
It was these supernatural beings that Shaddad bin Ad allegedly forced to build the Barhout Well.
But according to Al-Mujawir, there was more. “When much time had passed,” he wrote, “Shaddad bin Ad began sending all those who had to be imprisoned to this place,” both humans and evil jinn.
From this history, the Well of Barhout became known across the region as a prison for evil jinn, a sort of interdimensional station between the world of humans and the supernatural world of jinn where they could be trapped. The area even came to be called “Muqam al-jinn” – “the abode of the jinn.”
To this day, a local saying about the Well of Barhout describes it as a place where “extinct tongues fizz on cold nights,” implying the screams and voices often heard from the well are actually the voices of long imprisoned jinn.
As the years passed, the idea of the Barhout Well as a prison expanded, from a prison for jinn to a sort of purgatory for the damned, whether they be jinn or human.
Around the turn of the 16th century, an historian named Abu Makhrama, who was from the city of Aden, near the Well of Barhout, wrote extensively on the region’s history. Within this history was a story which spoke of the true nature of the Barhout Well.
“There was a man from the people of Khourasan living in Mecca, he was a man of many pious exertions in terms of worship and good acts, and people would often deposit money with him. A man left him with ten thousand dinars and left on a journey. When he returned to Mecca he discovered that the man had died. He asked the man’s sons and people about his money, and they said, “we have no knowledge of your money.” The man then went to a group from among the learned and abstemious of Mecca and complained to them about his affair. They instructed him that he should sit at the well of Zamzam until half or a third of the night had passed. He should then turn his head towards it and call out in a loud voice, O’Fulan, I am Fulan owner of the deposit, what have you done with it? The man did thus for three nights with no response. He returned to the group and told them nothing had happened. They then said to him, “verily we fear that this man is among the people of fire, and you must go to Yemen to a wadi in Aden called Barhout.” There he would find a well, and they instructed that he should put his head in it once again, when half of a third of the night had passed, he should then ask about the deposit. When the man did as instructed, this time the deceased replied that the money was buried in his room “in such and such a house” and told the depositor to return to Mecca and ask his son to dig it up.”
Abu Makhrama concludes the story with an assertion, making the moral clear:
“Verily, the souls of the profligate moan in the well of Barhout, and verily it is correct that it is in Aden where the people exiled to fire reside until the resurrection.”
This was taken further in the early 1900s by Shaykh Abbas-e Qummi, an Islamic scholar and renowned interpreter of religious books and ancient texts. In one of his most famous works, titled Manazilul Akhirah, he recounts an incredible story.
“One day, a man came to the presence of the Holy Prophet in a manner that fear had overtaken him, and his face had turned pale. He said that he had witnessed an astonishing event, which was the cause of his restlessness. On the Prophet’s inquiry, he said: “My wife has a disease, for the cure of which she requested me to fetch some water from the well at Wadi-e-Barhoot. I took a leather bag and a bowl and left. When I reached there, the eerie surrounding made me fearful and I hastily started searching for the well. I found one well and was about to fill water in the bag, when I heard the noise of chains from above me. I heard a voice requesting me for water, for he was dying of intense thirst. When I looked above, I saw a man hanging by a chain, which was bound around his neck. I was confused but agreed to his request for water. When I extended my hand to offer him water, the chain was suddenly pulled on top, and the man reached just near the blazing sun. I was dumbfounded and scared and started filling the water bag when I saw the man being sent down again. He again requested for water, and like before, when I extended my hand to give him, the chain was pulled up. This happened thrice. On the third time, I was totally frightened and ran away from there. O Prophet! I now request you to explain to me the incident.” The Holy Prophet replied, “The man whom you saw in the Wadi-e-Barhoot was none other than the accursed Cain, who had mercilessly murdered his brother Abel. He will be punished in the same manner in the valley, and on the day of Qayamat, he will be fed to the blazing fire of hell.””
From accounts like these, the local tradition began to see the Well of Barhout as a “prison of dark spirits” and “the souls of infidels“.
Quite simply, the idea of the Well of Barhout as a Well of Hell had been building for centuries, through religious texts and historical accounts. It was no wonder that as Mohammad Al-Kindi and his Oman Cave Exploration Team prepared to descend into the well, they were surrounded by locals issuing dire warnings.
Other Attempts to Explore The Well of Barhout
The thing is, Al-Kindi and his team were not even the first modern group to attempt to explore the depths of the well.
In 2013, the UAE’s Al-Bayan newspaper carried an account of a company called Desert Line attempting a visual survey of the well. According to the article, an employee was attached to a crane and lowered into the well with a video camera. At about 100 meters down, the employee began to scream and was quickly returned to the surface, where he asserted that as he had descended, the geometry of the walls had begun to shift and close in on him.
Thinking that perhaps their colleague had suffered from a bout of claustrophobia, the rest of the team moved to review the video footage. Yet, despite enough light coming in from the surface to presumably shoot good footage, the video camera recorded only black.
This type of equipment malfunction is not unusual around the Barhout Well.
Not two years before Al-Kindi and his team would make their attempt, a local YouTube channel called Hadhramaut came up with a brilliant idea – if there seemed to be problems every time a person was lowered into the well, why not just fly a drone in? The results of their attempt to do just this were stunningly cataloged in a video published on their YouTube channel.
At first, the drone descends normally, and a view of the inside of the well begins to come into focus. But then, the drone suddenly stops, then begins moving erratically.
“I literally can’t control it,” the pilot says, “it goes to the sides. It goes vertical and then suddenly it goes to the wall. You can barely bring it up again.”
When the pilot manages to recover the drone, he finds that its camera froze only a few seconds into the descent, and now does not work at all.
That’s when things start to get really bizarre.
All of a sudden, strange noises begin to come out of the well, which sound like groaning, howling. In the words of the channel’s host, “now we hear some sounds, scary sounds, sounds of wind, sounds of… something weird to be honest.”
The video ends with the men visibly shaken, and the host proclaiming, “Truly, whoever comes here will feel scared… whoever comes here, I don’t think he will get any benefit, except just taking a look and leaving.”
Would something similar to these stories happen to Al-Kindi and his team when they attempted their descent into the well?
It is interesting that shortly before their expedition, Yemeni officials seemed to wash their hands of anything which might happen once the team entered the well. The director of the region’s geological survey and mineral resources authority, Salah Babhair, gave an interview in which he skeptically stated,
“It’s very deep—we’ve never reached the bottom of this well, as there’s little oxygen and no ventilation. We have gone to visit the area and entered the well, reaching more than 50-60 meters down into it. We noticed strange things inside. We also smelled something strange. It’s a mysterious situation.”
In other words, Babhair seemed to be informing Al-Kindi and his team that they had already tried, and failed, to get to the bottom of the well, and if things did not go well, local authorities would not be to blame.
What They Found in The Well of Berhout
With all of this in mind, and the weight of centuries of history and legend on his shoulders, Al-Kindi took a deep breath and began his descent into the Well of Barhout, rappelling himself downward by a rope attached at the surface.
At first, everything was going smoothly.
“As soon as I went down the first 30 meters,” Al-Kindi said, “I could start seeing the details of the cave and its formations. It was a very happy moment, just going down, enjoying the scene.”
But then, without warning, there was a sharp jerk on the rope and Al-Kindi stopped moving, leaving him dangling in the dark, alone in the Well of Hell.
After a few moments, he realized that his rope was not long enough; he had come to the end of it without reaching the bottom. Calmly, he pulled out his walkie talkie and called up to the surface for a longer rope.
When it was sent down, he continued his descent, going further than anyone ever had, and in fact, making it all the way to the bottom. His body was not severed, the walls had not closed in, he was not set upon by evil spirits, nor did he disappear into another dimension. Instead, he stood on the floor of what appeared to be a somewhat normal cave.
There were, in his words, “loads of beautiful cave deposits,” including stalactites and stalagmites reaching as much as 30 feet tall, and an incredible deposit of cave pearls. There were also numerous birds, beetles, toads, and lizards, as well as, most notably, an enormous colony of eerily translucent snakes – “but they won’t bother you unless you bother them,” Al-Kindi joked. From the walls of the cave ran gleaming waterfalls of clear water.
Far from terrifying, it was, in the words of Al-Kindi, “quite spectacular.”
Following Al-Kindi, the rest of his team rappelled in, and together, they spent the better part of five or six hours exploring. Their cameras did not malfunction, and they were able to take astonishing photographs of the inside of the well. Yes, there was a foul odor, but that came from decomposing animal carcasses including many dead birds. Al-Kindi even drank a bottle of the water which flowed within the cave, later proclaiming, “I’m still alive!” before adding, “It’s very fresh, very normal water.”
Before returning to the surface, the team “collected samples of water, rocks, soil, and some dead animals,” with the intent to have them analyzed before publishing a full report on what they’d found shortly thereafter.
When they emerged from the well, the locals waiting on the surface were stunned. They bombarded the team with questions, which the daring explorers patiently answered, even showing the crowd photos and samples.
Al-Kindi strongly believed that by venturing into the Barhout Well, he had dispelled centuries of legend in a single afternoon. As he put it, “What we did here I think is essential, because we changed people’s minds at least about one of these places.”
After all those years, the great mystery of the Barhout Well, the Well of Hell, had been solved, not with a bang but a whimper.
Or had it…
Theories on The Well of Barhout as Well of Hell
For some, there remain unanswered questions about the Well of Barhout, details yet to be filled in which leave the mystery alive and well.
Why, for example, did Al-Kindi and his team not find any human remains in the well, alongside those of animals? The explanation which is most often given for the numerous strange disappearances around the well is that people were simply careless and fell in. So where were their bones? If they had fallen in, it seemed as if they had disappeared into thin air.
More importantly, in the weeks and months that followed the team’s exploration of the well, the promised report on the samples taken never materialized. If everything was as straightforward as the team suggested it was, then where was the report?
Those more tied to the religious history of the well went even further.
First of all, why were there so many snakes? And since the jinn are said to manifest in our world as snakes, could the existence of so many snakes actually provide evidence for it being the “abode of the jinn,” rather than against it?
Moreover, if the Barhout Well really was a sort of gateway to another dimension, a “prison of dark spirits,” would it not make sense that this gateway would open and close, that it would not always be visible to human eyes?
There’s something else though, something related back to the original words of Muhammad, to the Well of Barhout being “the worst water on the face of the earth.”
Is it possible we misunderstood the meaning of Muhammad’s metaphor all along?
The Well of Barhout - A Sleeping Super Volcano
In the late-1800s, there was no more famous a team of travelers than Theodore and Mabel Bent. Each year after their marriage in Liverpool, England and 1877, they would travel abroad, with Theodore writing and drawing sketches, and Mabel taking photographs and keeping a diary. Over the course of the next 15 years, the couple would document their travels through Italy and Greece, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia, and elsewhere.
In 1893, they would set off on their most dramatic journey of all, an attempt to explore deep into Yemen, which at that point was mostly unknown to Europeans. On these travels, they would approach the area which was home to the Well of Barhout. As Theodore wrote,
“We were very anxious indeed as to whether we could proceed any farther or should have to go back, and whether we could do either safely. We wanted to go right along the Wadi Hadhramout and to see Bir Borhut or Barahout.”
Their anxiousness was understandable; they had been told all about the Well of Barhout. “It is an Addite well in a dry desert and a gloomy valley,” Theodore records in his notes, “a well whose waters are black and fetid, where the souls of infidels make their abode.”
But there was more than that, an even more sinister characteristic the Bents had been told about.
“Masoudi in the tenth century speaks of it as the greatest volcano in the world, and says that it casts up immense masses of fire and that its thundering noise can be heard miles away.”
Indeed, they saw signs of volcanic activity as they approached the area. “On the heights near is much brimstone,” Theodore chronicles, before ominously adding, “they consider this place is the mouth of hell.”
Unfortunately for the Bents, the area encompassing the Well of Barhout was at that point in time part of the Ottoman Empire, and was thus off limits to British explorers like them. They were forced to return home without ever exploring this alleged great volcano.
Reading their accounts today, one might ask if this was simply a case of myth-making by locals, gobbled up by eager travelers. Or could the area really be home to a dormant supervolcano, a ‘mouth of hell’ which threatens the world?
In modern times, one thing is for certain – the area surrounding the Well of Barhout is “one of the most active tectonic boundaries” anywhere in the world.
Yemen is located at a triple junction between three tectonic plates which are constantly pulling away from each other and creating new oceanic crust. It has been established that there are at least 11 Holocene volcanos in the country, and there are volcanic rocks and cinder cones associated with lava flows all through the area. In fact, much of Yemen’s coast is known to have been created by lava flows.
Throughout the area’s history, volcanic activity has played a prominent part, from reports of an eruption in the area of Barhout Well in the 10th century, to accounts that a volcano was still “smoking” in 1813. Even in modern times, eruptions are common, including in 2007, when an island off the coast of Yemen was “engulfed in fire then disappeared,” killing a number of Yemeni soldiers who were stationed there, and in 2011, when a different eruption off the coast of Yemen lasted for nearly a month and created an entirely new island in the sea.
Is it really possible that amidst all this volcanic activity lies a dormant supervolcano which may one day erupt?
Conclusion
Perhaps this is what Muhammad really meant when he said that the Well of Barhout had the “worst water on the face of the earth” – the “worst water,” a metaphor for a volcanic eruption which could literally destroy the earth.
Perhaps the Well of Barhout really is a Well of Hell, that is, a supervolcano which could turn the world into a living hell.
If you want to learn more about the mysteries of Arabia, watch our documentary and article: