Düden is one river that falls twice in Antalya, and the second fall lands in the Mediterranean. The first comes in a park of plane trees on the edge of the city, where the water drops twenty metres into a cave it cut for itself, and stone steps take you down inside it. The fall hangs across the entrance, so the light in the chamber has come through the water before it reaches you. Everything in there is wet. You walk out of a July afternoon into cold air, and the noise leaves no room for talking. Outside, a railed walkway follows the rock wall above the stream, under ivy and plane trees, with the river running white beside you. In August people come up for the air as much as the water.
Ten kilometres downstream, at Lara, the rock simply stops. The river runs out of ground and goes over the edge, forty metres into open sea, and afterwards a paler patch spreads from the foot of the cliff until the Mediterranean takes it. That cliff is the river's own doing. Rain sinks into the limestone of the Taurus, turns faintly acid, dissolves the rock and surfaces again at the Kırkgöz springs carrying lime. As the water warms and gives up its carbon dioxide, the lime is laid down as travertine. The process has built a plateau of 630 square kilometres, and Antalya is standing on it. The Greeks knew the river as the Katarrhaktes, the word behind cataract, naming it for how it ends rather than where it begins. Boats out of the old harbour run along the cliffs until the fall is head-on, the one place the drop reads as a single line from lip to sea. With the sun behind you the spray throws a rainbow, and you meet it from above. The fall has another name down here, Karpuzkaldıran, the watermelon lifter. Cold springs surface near the shore, and people used to leave melons in them to chill; the water is said to have pushed the heaviest of them back up.