By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This fragment treats development on the hill as the end of an older fire-lit world and the spirit that once lived there.
Even in its brevity, the page contrasts building homes with losing a ritual landscape. The disappearance of fire trucks and parade makes progress feel like a kind of erasure.
Three lines closing the Metzes chapter, the sacrificial fire dedicated 'over the land that would always belong to a man who never knew me'. The end is dated by development - 'I stoped building fires when they started building homes on the hill' - and mourned in a single deflating image of 'fire trucks and firemen in dress parade along the hill where a spirit used to be'. The handwritten 'stoped' is preserved as on the scan.