#YES_TO_OMAN

The Persian well on top of the mountain

By Khaled H Abdul Malak — Once while driving up to Jabal Akhdhar, our friend and logistic support Nasser started talking about an old architectural structure on the top of the mountain,  known locally as, the Persian well. He explained that it was on the top of Al Gbool mountain above the village of Salloot in Jabal Akhdhar. A few week later in the month of September last year, Marta, my wife and myself decided to go and check this mysterious, lonely, edifice mentioned by our local contact. Early morning on Saturday after having camped at a place we call our “mountain house” in Jabal Akhdhar we packed our tent and camping gear and headed towards  Sallut driving down the valley from Saiq plateau. The road is very steep winding down and reaching the place where we started the crossing of Wadi Saada a few months earlier.

We parked the car after the village of Sallut and started looking for the trail I had spotted on Google Earth. We found it quickly but it was destroyed partially when the road going further down in the valley to Masirat Al Rawajeh, the last village reachable by car was built. Then the trail is in pretty good shape with a fantastic staircase built in the cliff at the edge of a sheer drop of a few hundred metres high! Further the footpath continues following a large traverse from which we could see some chambers built in the mountain. In some places some arrows are painted on the rock. We saw this kind of marks in many places in the mountain and we have been told that they are to mark the itinerary for training the soldiers.

Further a small bridge is built with trees trunks and stones. We crossed it carefully because it was partially damaged and a bad move could lead to a very high free fall. We could follow the track thanks to the shiny polished rocks showing us the way. While progressing we had a dramatic view of Wadi Al Mueidin and the village of Masirat Al Rawajeh hundreds of metres below us. We have been walking and climbing for one and a half hours from the car and it took us another hour to reach the top of Al Gbool mountain where our enigmatic construction lies. From the plateau we had a fantastic view of Wadi Mueidin to the east and Wadi Saada to the south. The plateau was very wide and we had no indications to find our “well”. We looked for another half an hour without any success and realised that we should come back another time with Nasser to locate the well.

Marta insisted to search more; I told her that I’d wait for her under the only existing tree I’d spotted around 100m away from us. When I reached the “Lonely Talha tree” (Acacia Gerardii), “BINGO!” the well was right there! A perfect square shaped structure with 20m a side, built with thin flat greyish lime stone with a 2m a side square hole in the middle. Marta came to join me and we had lunch in the shade of the single Talha tree nearby the single man made structure on the whole plateau. Happy with our discovery we went back and reached our car in less than two hours. I kept on thinking what could this structure have been? Was it a well? Or a ritual edifice?… I wished so much I could travel in time to have the answer.

Sunday 23rd, February 2014 / 23:01 Written by Oman Observer 

in Features