At 10,000 ft. on the looming Bezingi Wall in the Russian Caucasus, British Mountaineer Sir John Hunt stepped onto an ice bridge, started across, fell with the bridge into space. After dropping 20 ft. out of a possible 150, he was saved by a projecting ledge and a "very smart piece of rope work" by the next man on the lifeline, Olympic Steeplechase Gold Medalist Chris Brasher. Returned to the relative comfort of Moscow, the 48-year-old captain of the 1953 Everest conquest counted this year's venture--the first British expedition to Russia since 1938--a general success, e.g., the party reached two peaks over 17,000 ft. As for the ice bridge: "I thought I was in for it."

In Kansas City, Mo., tuning up in summer stock for her Broadway debut this autumn in Rodgers' & Hammerstein's The Flower Drum Song, California-born Nisei Singer Pat Suzuki, 23, felt the smoke of nightclubs getting out of her eyes, candidly recalled what she had seen through it. On nitery patrons: "I feel sorry for most of them. The men are trying to make a big impression on the women in their mink coats; their faces all look unhappy." On her colleagues: "In show business you meet a lot of brilliant people, and a lot of very stupid ones."

Cordoned with special detectives on his morning walks from London's Claridge's, eleven-year-old Prince Hassan, brother of Jordan's King Hussein, displayed sad-eyed evidence that the fun has gone out of being an Arab prince. Beginning his vacation from Hastings' Summer Field School, Prince Hassan was grounded in England, according to a Jordanian embassy official, because "travel at the moment is not as regular as it was."

When federal authorities learned that a Ku Klux Klan "welcome out" party* was waiting near the walls, they quietly moved their prisoner from Tallahassee's reformatory to the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta. Then they released long-legged (6 ft. 4 in.) Frederick John Kasper, 28, after eight months of a year's sentence for contempt of court in agitating the 1956 segregation riots in Clinton, Tenn. Scurrying back to Tallahassee, Kasper, who once dated a Negro girl in Manhattan, spoke to his friends from the steps of the State Capitol, demonstrated that he had lost some weight but recovered no marbles. The Republicans and Democrats, said Kasper, are committed to integration and destruction of the white race, so the nation needs a third party to save it "from Negro and Jew control." Before he can see to all that, however, Kasper has more immediate business. Defendant in a September trial for more riot agitation in Nashville, he awaits another decision (probably in October) of an appealed six-month sentence for more contempt in Clinton.

"Coming home to my children after months of touring," said Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, after returning to his chalet at Gstaad, Switzerland, "I thought it was high time for their father to do something about their musical education; not to make child prodigies of them--heaven forbid!--but just to let them know how their father makes a living." Plucked for the course: son Jeremy, 6.

Was Walter Alston unnerved by photos that showed him hanging in effigy near the hocks of a San Pedro, Calif, gas station's flying red horse? "I'm more worried about winning today's game," said the Dodger manager, still running on half a tank of sporting cliches. "You do the best you can, and it's useless to worry about it. It's not so nice to lose as to win, but you have to learn to take it."

With a surprised "Oh, no," and a lusty "Gosh awful," Patriarchitect Frank Lloyd Wright, 89, summering at his home and workshop in Spring Green, Wis., recoiled from photos of a ten-story addition to Tokyo's Wright-designed Imperial Hotel, said the annex' streamlined "International Style" was "neither international nor style." The labyrinthine Imperial, completed in 1922, had withstood the great 1923 Kwanto earthquake, while much of Tokyo fell to rubble. World War II's firebombings did not destroy it. But now, according to Wright, "Westernization" had effected what war and seism could not; there was no imagining "a more outrageous insult to the feeling and character of the original building--and to Japan." In Tokyo, Annex Architect Teitaro Takahashi, 66, had a stylus ready when the Wright balloon came along. Said Takahashi: "Wright's building is not at all Japanese, as he claims, and many of its facilities are now outdated. It was nicely designed for its period, but that was the Ricksha Age."

Although custom-tutored in privacy, Britain's royal Windsors have traditionally--like W. S. Gilbert's House of Peers -"made no pretense to intellectual eminence or scholarship sublime." Drawing down his term's end report from Cheam School, Charles, Prince of Wales, first heir to the throne to attend preparatory boarding school, showed an ambiguous relationship to the family tradition. With a 70, the prince led his 20-member class in geography. "In French," said a Cheam teacher, "he made excellent progress," i.e., 52; but "he did not do so well in maths. I don't think he would make an accountant."

Househunting in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands and finishing a new book, Manhattan-bred Novelist Herman (Marjorie Mornings tar) Woulc acknowledged that he had sold his New York apartment, described his new environment in terms ("peaceful," "superb climate") seldom hung on his native city.

With his budget-bloating Porgy and Bess in suspended production because of a studio fire (TIME, July 14), Cinemogul Sam Goldwyn decided to fire Director Rouben Mamoulian.Reason: "Differences of opinion." "I have the greatest respect for Rouben Mamoulian," said Sam, "but . . ." Said Mamoulian, who directed both the original play and the original musical: "Mr. Goldwyn's bland statement hides a story of deceit and calumny. In a suit which I propose to file, it will be necessary at long last to expose his publicity greed, his professional hypocrisy and selfishness." Mamoulian's examples: Goldwyn insisted that he be "identified publicity-wise as the sole creator of Porgy and Bess, and thereupon he ordered me to discharge my public relations counselor"; he "characterized himself as 'a powerful man,' whose enmity or displeasure could ruin me economically or professionally."

With familiar singleness of purpose, 22-year-old Peter Taft, grandson of William Howard Taft, son of Cincinnati Civic Leader Charles Phelps Taft, worked his way across the Pacific as deckhand on a freighter, arrived in Melbourne to ask for the hand of a young and beautiful Australian widow. He had met her last year at Yale when, as swimming captain, he had been called upon to show her the campus. An encouraging correspondence developed. But Wendy Marshall, 21--whose husband John Birnie Marshall broke 28 world records swimming "for God, my country, and Yale" and died in an auto crash near Ballarat after fathering her child, John Jr.--turned aside Taft's proposal with a gentle no. Peter said he would go on to Europe, study public affairs at Paris' Institute of Political Studies. Said Wendy Marshall: "At the moment, Peter is really a professional schoolboy. However, I am planning a trip to Europe next March, and what happens while I am overseas is not for comment now."

* Including Little Big Horned Klansman James ("Catfish") Cole, who called the Klan rally that was routed by whooping Lumbee Indians in Maxton, N.C. last January.

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