A slope of the Crimean mountain Demerdzhi scattered with hundreds of stone pillars up to twenty-five metres high — conglomerate from which the rain has washed the softer rock. In mist and at sunset the shapes read as people and animals, and the outlines shift with the light. A Crimean Tatar tradition explains them by the curse of a blacksmith who settled on the mountain; the name means blacksmith. In 1966 the mountain slid and buried part of the village of Lavanda.

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The Taos Hum

Since the early 1990s a fraction of this town's residents have heard a low steady hum that the rest cannot hear at all. In 1993, under pressure from complaints, Congress commissioned a study by Sandia and Los Alamos; instruments in the homes of hearers recorded nothing matching the descriptions. The hum is described as a distant diesel engine, it keeps people from sleeping, and there is no shutting it out — earplugs do not help.