No one recalled when the ground had begun to fall away, to drop suddenly without warning, leaving houses wavering on the gaping maw — why do maws gape? — like twins on a teeter-totter so finely balanced that their in- and exhalations had to be coördinated lest one of them triumphantly silhouette the other against the sky, the Ektachrome® blue desert sky, a color unknown to any but those born into the long-gone age of film-based photography, which would have done the scene crisp pictorial justice, the aforementioned not-quite-azure against the rusty-tawny soluble substrate the houses foolishly depended upon for support. Anyway.