I put this image on the natgeo Instagram feed in January and it reminds me that I should talk about planning a photograph. Sometimes images take months of planning.
Majlis al Jinn is a giant cave room in the Sultanate of Oman. It is over 400 feet wide and 1,000 feet long. The ceiling is almost 600 high. Multiple 747 airliners would fit on the floor. The scale of the room is difficult to imagine. There are huge holes in the ceiling that sometimes let in vast shafts of light. At the time I photographed it the cave was well known but I'd never seen a picture that captured the mystery of the place.
I spent a lot of time looking at maps and looking at where the the entrances in the roof were relative to the sun. I determined that the best time to go was August. If I was right there should be a slanting shaft of sunlight in the cave that was almost a quarter mile long.
The Arabian Peninsula is not a great place to be in August. It is 120° in the shade every day. There is no water on the plateau where the cave is just rocks and scrub. I was pretty nervous when the helicopter dropped 4 of us off and flew away. We rigged the rope the day we landed and descended into the room, but too lake to see if I was right about the shaft of light.
The room is truely huge.The skylights let in enough light that you can see the entire space. People on the floor look tiny.
The next day we were up early and into the cave before the heat. As the sun rose on the outside world a huge shaft of light split the chamber. It was beautiful and straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.
Stephen Alvarez
Sewanee, TN
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