Geli Ali Beg is a waterfall in a Zagros gorge in Iraqi Kurdistan, and most Iraqis have carried a picture of it in their pocket. It was on the five-dinar note through the 1970s and 1980s, and it is on the 5,000-dinar note in circulation today. Getting to it is half the drama. The highway through the Rawanduz canyon was blasted into the rock between 1928 and 1932 by a New Zealand engineer, Archibald Hamilton, who drove some 185 kilometres of road from Erbil to the Iranian border, and Kurds still call it the Hamilton Road. It clings to the canyon wall and swings out above a gorge hundreds of metres deep, so the country shows you its scale long before the waterfall does. At the falls the stream comes down a narrow chute, spreads across a limestone shelf and tips over a wide lip in a single white sheet. In spring the Zagros snowmelt runs the two stages together, and the whole staircase disappears under a brown flood.
What happens at the bottom is a day out. The approach path you walk in on is lined with tea and kebab stalls under thatched shades, and on Fridays it fills with families out from Erbil and Soran, children tearing about with water guns while lunch is spread on the rocks by the river. A walkway with rustic timber railings runs along the foot of the cliff to a point level with the falling water, and that is how grandparents and toddlers get close enough to feel the spray. Nobody agrees how tall the drop is. Published figures run from about ten metres to a hundred, both repeated with confidence; reporting from the region puts it near twelve and still calls it the tallest in Iraq. The fame was never about the height. Down on the pool, boatmen haul battered inflatables along ropes strung across the water until you are sitting directly under the curtain. It lasts a few minutes, and there is no version of it in which you stay dry.