The White Drin Waterfall is the first thing a river does. Above the city of Pejë in western Kosovo, under the Accursed Mountains, Mount Zhleb swallows its rain and snow into limestone and gives it back in one place: a spring at the foot of a cliff at Radavac. The water is a few paces old when it goes over a twenty-five-metre drop into the gorge. The short walk up from the village of Radac runs through damp beech forest, and the temperature falls as you get closer. On the way the newborn river spreads over stepped limestone and slides down in dozens of small cascades, every ledge padded with bright green moss. You hear the spring long before the trees part. Then the forest opens onto a clearing straight across from the fall, close enough that the roar arrives with a cold breath of air and a mist that settles on your face.
The cave beside the spring is the river's old front door. The same water cut its galleries and rimstone pools before it found a lower way out, and a lit walkway now takes you a few hundred metres into the hillside, cool and dripping after the noise outside. Explorers first pushed in in 1968, and the cave has since given up human remains reported to be six thousand years old — along with a First World War bullet and a man's pipe. Outside, the flow follows the snow rather than the calendar. Melt off the mountains takes weeks to work through the limestone, so the fall is at full roar in April and May. By late summer the curtain can thin sharply, with water drawn off as well for the city's taps and a hydro plant. In late October the beech forest on the path turns copper around the white water. In deep winter the moss and the rocks are stiff with frost, the valley goes almost silent, and the spring keeps coming anyway, clear and unhurried. It has spent years underground, and it arrives at the same cold temperature whatever the season above.