Durmitor is a massif of forty-eight limestone peaks in northern Montenegro, and everything about it is what the ice left behind. Glaciers ground the summits into shape and, when they went, left eighteen lakes scattered across the high slopes — gorske oči, the mountain eyes, in local speech. The best known of them is Crno jezero, the Black Lake, two pools of dark green water under the pyramid of Međed, ringed by old spruce and beech. A level loop of three and a half kilometres follows the shore, and early, before the wind gets up, the mountain and the forest hang upside down beside you in the water. You can take a wooden rowboat out, and from the middle the shoreline path disappears. Wading in is bracing even in August: the water was snow on the peaks not long before.
From the pastures above, trails take you up to a sharp ridgeline and its rows of limestone summits. Along one edge of the massif the ground goes the other way. The Tara canyon drops 1,300 metres, the deepest in Europe, and inflatable rafts carry you down the cold, clear river along its floor through white rapids, past springs and waterfalls that spill straight off the cliffs overhead. They pass under the Đurđevića Tara bridge, five concrete arches finished in 1940. Two years later one of the engineers who built it guided a partisan charge that blew out a span to stop an occupying army crossing; he was captured and executed on his own bridge, which was rebuilt in 1946. In a guarded pocket of the canyon called Crna Poda stands one of the last virgin black pine forests in Europe, trees more than 450 years old and over fifty metres tall. The ice itself is not entirely gone. High on the flank of Obla Glava, cold air pools in a cave and never fully drains, so pillars and curtains of ice stand through August while the meadows outside are in flower.