In 2010, an avid caver named Jeff decided to go to Madagascar to explore a natural cave shaft he had discovered years earlier. He arrived in country, got a rental car, and hired a guide to take him out to the area where he knew this cave was going to be. When he got out to that area, he used his notebook where he had taken notes from the last time he was there and used that to find the opening to the cave.
He paid the guide to stick around at the car while he went down and explored this cave. He insured him it was not going to be for a very long time. The shaft was approximately 50 meters deep and one meter across, so it was pretty narrow. The first 20 meters of the descent was like a downwards hill and the final 30 meters are down at a vertical drop. At the bottom of this cave, there was an opening where he could actually stand up and walk around but there were no other tunnels to explore at the bottom so you would just go down, touch the bottom, and go back up.
The visibility inside of the shaft was limited because all he had was the light that was coming in and because of how narrow the opening was, Jeff's body would obscure a lot of the sunlight coming in. Once Jeff got a few meters down into the tunnel, he would rely on his headlamp. He enters the cave, and he makes his way down to the 20-meter mark. He was about to descend all the way down the other 30 meters when he notices something out of the corner of his eye, and he focuses his light on the side of the shaft. He sees thousands of Black Widow spiders trying to escape the light. They're scattering all over the walls and he looks around him and he realizes that from this position down on the vertical section of the shaft is covered in Black Widow spiders.
As much as Jess wanted to stop right there and go right back up to the surface, he couldn't. In order to go back up this line that he was repelling down. He needed technical gear which was packed in his backpack, and it would just be unsafe trying to fish it out of his bag. He would have to descent the final 30 meters to the bottom then take his pack off, get the gear out, and go back up. And so, Jeff took a deep breath, and he began his slow, awful descent into this cafe filled with spiders.
Periodically, he would bump into the wall, and he'd hear them scatter all over the walls and hears them climbing on his sleeves. He'd then have to brush them off the sleeves. He saw them on the rope, he's trying to brush them off. He finally gets to the bottom, and he can hear the spiders on the wall just crawling all over the place. He takes his bag off and it's covered in spiders. He opens it up, spiders crawl out of his bag. He carefully reaches in and pulls out his technical gear. He throws it up and begins making his way back up.
The whole time he just brushes spiders off of him. Once he gets to the surface, the first thing he does is he strips all of his clothing off to get all the spiders off his clothing. He takes his bag, dumps it out. More spiders in there. After he brushes all the spiders off he redresses and gets in the car. You can only imagine what the guide was thinking as he's watching this foreigner taking his clothes off after being in this cave.
Luckily Jeff doesn't get bit. He gets in the car with the guide and they start heading back towards the city. He takes his notebook out and he scratches off the title he had given this cave from the last time he was here which was the Crooked Tube. He scratches that off and on top of it he writes, 'The Entrance to Hell'.
Comments