Zaman's Hill (1934)

VII. Zaman’s Hill

The great hill hung close over the old town,

A precipice against the main street’s end;

Green, tall, and wooded, looking darkly down

Upon the steeple at the highway bend.

Two hundred years the whispers had been heard

About what happened on the man-shunned slope—

Tales of an oddly mangled deer or bird,

Or of lost boys whose kin had ceased to hope.

One day the mail-man found no village there,

Nor were its folk or houses seen again;

People came out from Aylesbury to stare—

Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain

That he was mad for saying he had spied

The great hill’s gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide.