The upper ribbon of white water had been blocked, leaving the lower falls to drain what had already descended. To the right of where the upper Yosemite had once been, the freestanding pillar of Lost Arrow leaned several hundred feet of its length slowly out from the cliff face, broke into sections in midfall, and tumbled down the brush- and tree-covered slopes below. More rock spilled from the northeastern granite walls above the valley, obscuring the floor with disintegrating boulders and roils of brown and white dust.

"Why not us?" Minelli said. "It's all on that side."

A superstitious something in Edward wanted to shut him up. Pretend as if we're not here. Don't let it know.

The rock beneath them quivered. The trees beyond the hymn singers swayed and groaned and splintered, limbs whipping back and forth. Edward heard the hideous crack of great leaves of granite shearing away beneath the point. Three thousand feet below—he didn't need to look to know—Camo Curry and Curry Village were being buried under millions of tons of jagged rock. The hymn singers stopped and clutched each other to keep their balance.

"Time to get away," Edward said to Betsy. She lay flat on her back, staring up at the twisted, malevolent overcast painted on the sky. The air seemed thinner; great waves of high and low pressure raced over the land, propelled by the minute shifting of continents.

Edward reached under her arms and dragged her away from the lowest terrace, up the steps. The game now was to stay alive as long as possible, to see as much as they could see—to experience the spectacle to their last breath, which could be at any moment.

Minelli crawled after them, face wrapped in a manic grin. "Can you believe this?" he said over and over.

The valley was alive with the echoes of falling sheets of granite. Edward could hardly hear his own words to Betsy as they stumbled and ran down the asphalt path, away from the rim.

A scant yard behind Minelli, the rock split. The terrace and all that was beneath leaned away, the gap widening with majestic slowness. Minelli scrambled frantically, his grin transformed into a rictus of terror.

To the east, like the great wise head of a dozing giant, Half Dome nodded a few degrees and tilted into a chasm opened in the floor of the valley. In arc-shaped wedges, it began to come apart. Liberty Cap and Mount Broderick, on the south side of the valley, leaned to the north, but stayed whole, rolling and sliding like giant pebbles into the mass of Half Dome's settling fragments, diverting, and then finally shattering and sending fragments through miles of the valley. Somewhere in the obscurity of dust were the remnants of the Mist Trail, Vernal Fall, Nevada Fall, and the Emerald Lake.