La Grotte de Jeita - Caving in the Lebanon 

            Between 1953 and 1954 I was lucky enough to visit Beirut on two occasions, the longest being for ten days during the summer of 1954.  On the first visit I had quartered the city, a beautiful, peaceful place in those days.  I photographed everything worth photographing, had taken a coach trip to Baalbek and Damascus and done most of things a tourist, albeit a working tourist, was supposed to do.  The question arose, therefore, as to what could be done differently during the forthcoming ten day visit.  

I was a member of an enthusiastic, Royal Naval "outward bound" group always eager to engage in whatever unusual activities a country might have on offer. One of our number had heard a rumour that there was an unexplored river in the Lebanon - unexplored because its course lay largely underground.  What is more, despite great efforts by various groups and individuals, the source of the river could not be found.  The response to a letter to the Spéléo Club du Liban provided a contact with Albert Anavy, a tutor at the American University in Beirut, who had first hand knowledge of the river and its cave system.  Anavy and his colleagues were incredibly helpful, initially advising us by post on the equipment we would need for the expedition and later, when we arrived in the Lebanon, organising a briefing evening to enable us to meet members of the Club who had visited the cave system many times. 

So the scene was set.  There were about twelve of us in the group and we assembled on the dockside complete with backpacks and individual rubber dinghies at the crack of dawn.   From here we were picked up by a Lebanese army truck and driven North up the coast road towards Tripoli.   After about an hour's drive the truck pulled to the side of the road and the driver indicated that this was as far as he could go.  It wasn't as though we could get lost because the river, Nahr el Kalb, was in sight and all we had to do was to follow it to discover where it issued from the mountain. 

After a walk of several miles we saw the rather forbidding hole from which the river emerged.  Entrance to the cave system was not possible from that point because of the existence of a sump, a natural sort of "U" bend.   We had, instead, to climb further up the hill, back from the river exit, and locate what Anavy had called a fox earth.  And this is what it appeared to be, a wide, low-roofed cave which narrowed rapidly to a body sized hole with a polished, steeply sloping floor disappearing into complete darkness.  There were muted water noises coming up from below and although we knew that there was a beach of sorts below the entrance we did not know how far below it was.

A rope was rigged, more as an aid to getting back to daylight, and the first of our intrepid crew went down the rope to the beach which proved to be only six feet or so below the chute.  The beach was quite large enough for us all to inflate our dinghies and make our preparations to paddle across to the first obstacle, L'Ecran de Bouthon, a huge boulder which lay across the passage.  Disembarking and clambering over the boulder with all our equipment, lit only with the wavering light from our miner's lamps, showed that this was not exactly going to be a picnic.  But it was worth it.  On the other side we saw the first of the cave's magnificent calcite formations as we paddled through Le Cathédrale  shown below right.

At various points within this section of the system were galleries sloping upwards and back from the main cave which were filled with a huge number of stalactites and stalagmites of varying sizes and colors ranging from a yellowish white to deep red oxide.  Sadly none of us had color film loaded in our cameras.  An oversight perhaps but in the 1950s the speed of color film was fairly low and we figured that flash photography (with bulbs) had to have the fastest possible film if we were going to record anything worthwhile.  But the formations in Le Cathédral were as nothing when we reached the next stopping place, Salle de Maxwell, so called because of the enormous joined stalactite - stalagmite discovered by a missionary called Maxwell in the late nineteenth century.  I am not at all clear as to how Maxwell, together with a companion Thomson,  found either the cave, and having found it, how they were able to advance so far into it given the nature of the place.  Maxwell's Pillar is, from memory, about forty feet in height and of the same circumference.  Given the tiny annual growth rate for this kind of formation its longevity must be almost immeasurable.   There was a fairly substantial "beach" in Salle de Maxwell and we stopped here to brew up and take stock.   The major difficulty was lack of light and we were supplementing our miner's lamps with candles carried in the hand and stuck to convenient outcrops of rock.  What would we have given for just one of the one million candle-power lamps that present day cavers seem to use?          

In the Salle de Maxwell was another large gallery in the wall of the chamber,  Grenier aux Stalagmites, the floor of which was littered with many intricate calcite formations. At the north end was a jumble of rocks, Les Dardanelles, through and over which we had to carry our equipment at the start of the next leg of our journey.

After a stretch of relatively quiet water we came to another rock fall at a point  where the chamber narrowed.  The current here was significantly stronger and the water issued from what appeared to be a tunnel at the side of the rock fall.  This was identified as that part of the system known as Les Draperies, so called because of the folded nature of the calcite formations that were suspended from the roof of the tunnel.  We were to make a much closer inspection of Les Draperies on the return journey.  It was clearly impossible to paddle against the strength of the current so it was another case of humping all the gear over the rock fall

           Maxwell's Pillar. Size can be estimated                                              by the rubber boats to its left base.

                                                  Grenier aux Stalagmites (below)

On the other side we passed another rock fall named Eboulis and arrived in an enormous chamber called Le Panthéon.  Here there were calcite formations of all kinds with names like La Pendeloque, Dôme de la Bouteille and La Poterie.  It was time for another brew and a review of our situation.  Being complete amateurs at caving it had taken us some hours to reach La Panthéon so we decided that we should retrace our steps rather than risk missing our lift back to Beirut.  We also made what was, in retrospect, our most foolhardy decision of the trip.  Having been assured that the river was quite low for the time of year we opted, on that basis,  to avoid one portage on the return journey  by shooting the rapids at Les Draperies.  The first through was to be attached to a rope 'just in case' and, having proved it was possible, the rest of us would follow him through.  One of the dingies looked  as  though  it  had developed a puncture so there were some quick running repairs before we set off.  Needless to say we got through Les Draperies without incident but it was a wild ride.  We had to lie completely flat in the dinghy and, in this position, the pendant formations were only inches above our faces.  The, by now, fairly feeble light of the miner's lamp revealed the occasional jagged rock peeking above the water's surface.  Luckily no dinghy was snagged and we arrived on the far side exhilarated and unscathed.

    Puncture repairs.                                                                                                        Entrance to Les Draperies.  

Exploration of La Grotte de Jeita is still high on the agenda of a number of caving organisations.  At the present time the length of the explored section exceeds 9 Km and it has a maximum depth of 141m.I am indebted to Steven Smeyers, a member of the speleological society from the Belgian University of Leuven, who kindly provided me with an "up-to-date map" of Jeita together with the latest information about the on-going exploration.  Exploration of the river was completed in 1958 by a Mr Karkabi who found another sump at its far end.  The sump has been dived but with no result.  Jeita is now exploited for tourism and the source of the river still eludes the seekers.

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