Hidden volumes and surfaces again. Insignificance.

Geologists dealt with insignificance all the time, but how many applied it directly to their personal lives?

"... cleft for meeee . . . Let me hiiide myself in theeee ..."

"The air is getting hotter," Minelli said. The neckband of his black T-shirt was soaked and his hair hung down in black ribbons. Inez sat farther back, on the upper terrace, sobbing quietly to herself.

"Go to her," Edward commanded, nodding in her direction.

Minelli gave him a helpless look, then climbed up the steps.

"People are all that matter," he said softly to Betsy. "Nothing else matters. Not in the beginning, not in the end."

"Look," Betsy said, pointing to the east. Clouds were racing across the sky, not billowing but simply forming in streamers at very high altitude. The air smelled electric and was oppressive, tangible, thick and hot. The sun seemed farther away, lost in a thin milky soup.

Edward looked down from the clouds, dizzy, and tried to orient on the valley. He searched for a familiar landmark, something to give him a fixed perspective.

The Royal Arches, in slow motion, slipped in huge curved flakes down the gray face of granite onto the burning hotel. Tiny trees danced frantically and then fell on their own isolated chips of rock, limbs raised by the passing air. The roar, even across the valley, was deafening. The scythe-shaped flakes, dozens of yards wide, crumpled like old plaster on the valley floor, extinguishing the Ahwanee, the fire trucks, fire fighters, and tiny crowds of onlookers in a blossoming cloud of dust and debris. Boulders the size of houses rolled through the forest and into the Merced River. New slopes of talus crept across the valley floor like an amoeba's pseudopods, alive, churning, settling, striving for stability.

Betsy said nothing. Edward glanced apprehensively at the crack in the terrace nearby.

Minelli had given up trying to hold on to Inez. She fled from the rim, her breasts and arms and hips bouncing as she leaped up steps and over rails. He grinned at Edward and held out his hands helplessly, then descended to sit beside them.

"Some folks ain't got it," he said over the declining rumble of falling rocks. He looked admiringly at Betsy. "Guts," he said. "True grit. Did you see those concentrics come apart? Just like in school. Hundreds of years in a second."

"Weaarechiiildreninyouuurhaaands . . ." The hymn singers were self-absorbed now, paying no attention to all that was going on around them. Entranced.

To each his own.

"That's how the domes are formed, that kind of concentric jointing," Minelli explained. "Water gets into the joints and freezes, expands, splits the rock away."

Betsy ignored him, staring fixedly into the valley her hand still locked in Edward's.

"The falls," she said. "Yosemite Falls."