Between 1945 and 1950 five people vanished without trace in the woods below Glastenbury Mountain: an experienced guide, a college student, a war veteran, an eight-year-old boy, and a woman travelling by bus. Only one body was ever found, seven months later, on ground that had already been searched. Tradition holds that the local tribes considered the mountain cursed and used it only for burial. The town of Glastenbury itself was formally unincorporated in 1937 for want of residents.

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Mangystau

A region on the eastern shore of the Caspian where chalk outliers stand in the desert like the ruins of cities, and ridges of perfectly round stone spheres emerge from the ground — concretions up to three metres across. Beket-Ata is here too, an underground mosque cut into a chalk hill by a Sufi preacher in the eighteenth century; a steady stream of pilgrims comes to it, and tradition requires the night before a visit to be spent in the neighbouring valley.