In America, there are many anomalous places marked by the presence of evil spirits. Even their names speak about it: Devil's Ring, Road to Nowhere, Devil's Canyon, Devil's Tower. But even among these "horror stories", Death Valley, located in the western United States, in the heart of the Mojave Desert, stands apart. It is a narrow long plain, sandwiched by a solid wall of sheer cliffs.
The name of the pass in the saddle of the Black Mountains bordering the Valley of Death from the east, Dantev Vid, speaks of the inhospitableness and mystery of these places. From the pass one really opens a view of the lifeless desert, over which a red-hot hellish haze always trembles. It is the driest and hottest place in the Western Hemisphere.
Summer daytime temperatures above 50 degrees are common. And on July 10, 1913, a temperature of 57 degrees was recorded in Death Valley, and this record has not yet been broken. This is where the Devil's Hole is located.
A deadly place
American scientist and journalist John Maglens told me about the Devil's Hole. Last summer he came to Petersburg and dropped in to visit me. John told a lot of interesting things about his travels. We started talking about anomalous phenomena.
“You know, Nick,” he told me, “the most terrible place on Earth that I’ve ever seen is the Devil's Hole.
Two years ago, John was on assignment from the American Geographical Society in the Western United States. He investigated some anomalous phenomena in the Death Valley National Park. And, of course, I could not help but visit one of the strangest and most mysterious places.
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The Devil's Hole is a bottomless well, a hole in the ground, the true depth of which no one has yet been able to measure. It is possible that it goes into the bowels of the planet beyond the famous Kola superdeep well.
Geologists believe that this is nothing more than a gap between two tectonic plates, which in this place are slightly separated from each other. Some sources say that the size of the hole at the surface is about 9 by 12 meters. But John, after his own hand measurements, claims that the true dimensions of this devil's well are even less -1.8x5.6 meters.
Nowadays it is not so easy to get access to this curiosity. The Devil's Hole is fenced off from the "wild" tourists by a two-meter fence with barbed wire. The perimeter can only be accessed by organized groups or by special passes issued by the park management. And this is not an empty precaution.
It is not safe for a person to be in this place. According to an Indian legend, an evil spirit lives in the hole, capable of killing anyone who approached his monastery, and at night he leaves his hiding place and checks if there are strangers where.
Aboriginals from the nearby Paiuto tribe believe that if you fall asleep near a well, you will never wake up. Their shamans claim that the evil spirit that dwells in this failure senses when someone appears here, and then he goes out of his lair and strangles the victim. The rest of the time, when no one bothers the spirit, it quietly slumbers underground.
John said that in the process of researching the Devil's Hole, his health sharply deteriorated: his blood pressure jumped, his head dizzy, and nausea came to his throat. Then I was irresistibly drawn to sleep, I wanted to lie down on the ground and sleep, sleep, sleep …
He woke up on a couch in the guard's trailer. It turns out that John lost consciousness and fell. Seeing this, the guard pulled him out of the dangerous place and revived him.
Such cases of deterioration of health near the Devil's Hole are not so rare. Scientists attribute this to the release of methane or other harmful gas. Nobody knows where it comes from, but one thing is known: its emissions are irregular. So John was "lucky." Or the owner of the well paid special attention to him.
Bottomless abyss
There is an underground lake in the Devil's Hole at a depth of 90 to 120 meters from the surface. Such a spread in numbers is explained by the fact that the water level is constantly fluctuating. Some believe that the ebb and flow are related to the influence of the moon. Until now, nobody has been able to determine the depth of this reservoir. The first attempts were made at the beginning of the 20th century, but were not crowned with success.
After about half a century, they tried to lower a load on a metal cable to the bottom. But this cable caught on something and broke off. The same fate befell the second cable. After that, rumors spread that some huge animal lives at the bottom of the reservoir, which interferes with research, or maybe it is even the same evil spirit that the Indians talk about, or the devil himself, protecting the entrance to his kingdom.
In 1999, a controlled TV camera equipped with powerful searchlights was lowered into the reservoir. Information about this study appeared only four years later. It turned out that at about 80 meters depth, the walls of the underwater well expanded. And after another hundred meters they could not be seen at all.
At a depth of 220 meters, the searchlights turned off, so further shooting was carried out in complete darkness. After walking 230 meters, the camera began to spin and swing. It looked like she was caught in a whirlpool. They began to lift it, while a bluish glow was recorded from below for 15 seconds.
Gatekeepers
The water temperature in the underground lake is about 33 degrees Celsius. But this water is not at all the same with which we are used to dealing in everyday life. There is such a concept in modern science as "heavy water". At first glance, it is no different from the usual one, only it does not consist of oxygen and hydrogen, but of oxygen and deuterium, a hydrogen isotope.
It can also be called dead water. An animal that drinks heavy water dies very soon, and biologists reasonably believe that life is impossible in its environment. Nevertheless, there is life in this poisonous environment! Anyway, in the upper layer of water.
The survival champion is a small fish toothfish, which is like a gatekeeper guarding the entrance to this "kingdom of death". Small fish, outwardly unremarkable. Its average length is 19 millimeters. But the character of the toothfish is heroic, and the adaptability is simply amazing. For 60 thousand years, it resisted first the ice age, then the high temperatures of the desert, and then the destruction of the habitat, arranged by man.
But the two-legged just finished off the "opportunist". The kartozubika is called the rarest fish in the world. It is understandable - about fifty individuals remained. In any case, this is what ichthyologists who tried to examine the lake say.
The first major blow to the fishfish habitat came in the late 1960s, when local farmers began to illegally use groundwater for irrigation, causing the lake to drop in water levels. Although the Desert Fish Conservation Council won the lawsuit, the fishtooth population continued to melt rapidly.
Attempts were made to relocate the fish to other places, but they all ended in failure. So it is possible that in the very near future the water in the lake will really become dead, lifeless. Or the owner of the hole will have to look for other gatekeepers.
The owner goes for a walk
The Devil's Hole is one of the anomalous zones. UFOs, ghosts, fireballs, time shifts are observed here, because of which people disappear.
John was at the Devil's Hole for only a couple of hours, besides during the day, so he did not observe anything supernatural. But the guard who gave him first aid said that his former partner saw a strange two-legged creature emerge from the hole in the moonlight at midnight, representing a hybrid of a devil, as it is depicted in the pictures, and a dragon with a powerful jagged tail. After standing for a few moments at the gap, the creature stepped away and disappeared into the depths of the desert. The next day, the partner quit. And the guy himself, who told John this story, did not observe anything like this.
Who knows if there really was such a case or is it just another horror story for meticulous tourists? But one thing is certain: in anomalous zones like the Devil's Hole, phenomena are observed that cannot be explained from the point of view of science and remain closed to human understanding.
Nikolay VALENTINOV