Neutral atomic-hydrogen column-density distribution of C i absorbers (red-filled histogram; left-hand axis). Proximate systems are displayed in salmon. The N(H i) distribution of intervening DLAs from SDSS DR7 (Noterdaeme et al. 2009b, blue-hashed histogram) is over-plotted using a different scaling (right-hand axis) so that the areas of the two histograms above log N(H i) = 20.3 are equal. The curve is a fit of the distribution in the sub-DLA regime from Prochaska et al. (2014). The inset shows the cumulative N(H i) distributions of the intervening C i and DLA samples starting at log N(H i) = 20.3 (atoms cm^-2) and the two-sided Kolmogorov-Smirnov test probability that the two distributions come from the same parent population.