The Dam on the Sideboard

The sitting room of a bungalow in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, on a hot evening, on a dark sideboard a round cream-white earthenware plate twenty-seven centimetres across upright in a wooden plate stand, a thin dark line at its rim, in the centre a round black-brown picture of a curved dam wall with a foaming spillway, small cars on the road along its top, trees and hills, around it four small vignettes of a power house, a crane, a machine with cables and a pylon, the curved band above and the panel below bare plain cream, warm light from a standard lamp, through the open window a distant pylon against a red sky.