The Marble Cave of Gadime is a cave dissolved out of solid marble in the Lipjan municipality of central Kosovo, twenty kilometres south of Pristina, its galleries hung with stalactites over more than twenty underground lakes and with needles of aragonite that grow sideways and upward against gravity, and it was found in 1967 by a villager cutting stone in his garden, who broke into it with his pick. Marble caves are rare, since marble is dense and dissolves slowly, and the galleries here do not wander but follow the cracks in the rock in straight lines and right angles, so the cave is a grid of passages 1,260 metres long, of which the lit route covers a fraction, with dark openings leading off it the whole way; the halls are still wet, stalactites hanging in dense clusters over blunt rounded stalagmites and every surface shining because the water is still reaching it, and in one gallery needle-thin aragonite crystals burst out of the wall in sprays up to thirty centimetres long, growing with no regard for which way is down, formed by the slow evaporation of water from the pores of the marble rather than by dripping. In one chamber two formations lean toward each other with a few centimetres of air left between them, the Garden of Love, which the guides say will meet in a few thousand years.
About a thousand bats of eight species roost in the unlit galleries, and beneath them lives an unseen population of crickets feeding on the insects in the guano, a food chain that runs on droppings in the dark. Snow lies over the Kosovo basin from November to March, and as it melts the river swells and the cave's lakes rise with it, the drips quickening and the marble glistening, the stone visibly still growing. The tour takes half an hour with a guide, and the village of Gadime stands over the cave. Gadime is a cave cut through marble along its cracks, and the crystals in it grow the wrong way.