The Drowned Arches

The roofless ruin of a red brick power station hall standing on pale rounded boulders in a reservoir in southern Japan on a humid late August afternoon, the water drawn far down, two storeys of tall round-arched openings in long rows, the brick laid in English bond, at each end a stepped gable with a round window, a taller head block at the left, along the walls a dark band of the high-water line and dried grey-green algae, every brick plain and unmarked, through the open arches the green of the far bank, the whole arcade mirrored in the still green water, a steep slope of dense forest behind in soft haze.