The Black Climber

A figure in black who appears in the mountains: in some accounts he helps the lost, in others he leads them off the path. The legend is common to Soviet mountaineering as a whole and has been recorded in the Caucasus, the Tian Shan and the Pamirs; each region has its own version of who he was in life — usually somebody who was abandoned on a rope. The story has a practical point, and it explains its durability: it says out loud what actually happens in mountains, and what that world fears more than dying.

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An ocean liner moored at Long Beach since 1967. Some forty-nine deaths occurred aboard during her thirty-one years of service, including an eighteen-year-old crewman crushed by watertight door 13. In the war she carried troops and once, on a manoeuvre, cut her escort cruiser in half, drowning over three hundred men; stopping to rescue them was forbidden because of submarines. Stateroom B340 is let separately and has a reputation of its own.