Suddenly [says Lummis] he felt the ground quiver beneath his feet. A strange rushing sound filled his ears; and whirling about, he saw the great Ladder Rock rear, throw its head out from the cliff, reel there an instant in mid-air, and then go toppling out into the plain like some wounded Titan. As thousands of tons of rock smote upon the solid earth with a hideous roar, a great cloud went up, and the valley seemed to rock to and fro. From the face of the cliff three miles away, great rocks came leaping and thundering down, and the tall pines swayed and bowed as before a hurricane. A-chi-te was thrown headlong by the shock, and lay stunned. The Ladder Rock had fallen—the unprecedented flood had undermined its sandy bed.[138] Thus are we led to think that some portentous convulsion of nature had toppled off the pueblo, destroyed the ladder trail, and left the colony homeless. No effort is recorded of any attempt to save the hapless women, and the chapter is abruptly closed. It was apparently after this terrible disaster that the mesa was called Katzímo, the “accursed” or “enchanted,” and many is the spot that has earned such title for less cause. How the mesa top looked before it was accursed we can never know, but a few piñons and cedars on its top suggest the probability of its having been sparsely wooded. This is a land of tempestuous thunder-storms and heavy rains, when the water falls in cataracts over the mesa summit, carrying fresh detritus to the heaps of talus below. Since this has been going on for centuries, it is of course almost hopeless to find much genuine record on the cliff itself of the origin and development of its people. Nevertheless a few faint traces do exist, and because the legends and the folk-lore of Katzímo and of Ácoma are so closely intertwined, we cannot envisage the story of Ácoma without including Katzímo, however slight the hope of disentangling solid fact from poetic legend. We have good reason to believe that there are still shrines in the recesses of Katzímo, and that in all probability there takes place either in these clefts or on the summit periodic performance of rituals by the Ácoma people. One clue to such use of the mesa is given by Miss McLain of the Indian Service. She reported that an Indian family told her that, when an Ácoma youth is being instructed in the _kiva_ into the mysteries of the faith, the last step in his initiatory discipline before giving him full freedom as a man, is to blindfold him and send him to the top of the Mesa Encantada for a night’s lonely vigil, bearing a jar of water as oblation to the spirits. It was explained to her that a boy could climb blindfolded where he could not go open-eyed, “a fact all mountain engineers will substantiate.”[139] There is also reason to think that these novices as well as the worshippers at other ceremonies on Katzímo have their own undivulged means of reaching the summit.