The Baatara Gorge Waterfall drops past three bridges nobody built. At Balaa, near Tannourine in northern Lebanon, a stream of snowmelt crosses green pasture to a place where the ground simply ends, and goes down a limestone shaft 240 metres deep. On the way it threads three natural arches, stacked at three different heights in the same wall. They are leftovers. Water works along cracks and dissolves limestone from the inside, and as the chamber widened its ceiling came down in stages; three spans happened to hold. At the plateau's edge the pasture runs right to the lip, and that is the one place where you take in the size of the hole all at once, before the path leads you down inside it.
A steep track puts you at the level of the middle bridge in about a quarter of an hour. From there the arches stack one behind another, moss has furred them green, the stone is wet, the noise is constant, and the far wall of the shaft rises well above your head. Until near midday the bridges sit in flat shadow, because the sun is too low to reach into a hole this deep. The season decides whether there is any water at all. Melt off the peaks above Balaa runs the fall at its fullest in March and April, thins it through May, and by summer the three arches stand over a dry shaft. The sinkhole lies directly on the Lebanon Mountain Trail, and walking in across the plateau, cedars on one side and the Kadisha valley on the other, gives it its setting. It reached the outside world in 1952 through Henri Coiffait, a French scientist who studied the animals that live in caves and came here after beetles rather than waterfalls. The water that goes into the shaft is simply gone. In 1988 cavers tipped fluorescent dye into it and waited to see where the colour would come out; it surfaced at the Dalleh springs, six kilometres away inside the mountain.