Come quickly against this wall, wipe the grime from the window, and watch the craftsman at work.

He is hard to spot at first amid the hanging tools and the flickering of the flames, but you will soon see him step into the light of his single lantern there on the carpenter's worktop. But a moment to gather his equipment, scarred fingertips rifling through tongs and pliers while his shadow falls upon the design he has laid at the station.

Watch as his veins run with power. The anvil and the pail of water he gathers closer to his bellows, dragging paint from the flaked yellow clearance hatching. He raises one hand, shields his brow from the furnace heat, and looks about the factory. His mouth hangs slack, his grey eyes are rimmed red with fatigue, but beneath his locks of sweatsoaked hair intricate and secret thoughts are ordered.

And at last, he turns and begins.

It does not matter that at times his oaken back obscures his hands. The work is not for us to understand. To those such as we, iron is permanent, rigid, a final state. It is.

But for the craftsman, iron was, and iron can be. It comes alive at the nip of the pliers or the heavy edge of a hammer. Iron trickles like water at his forge, hisses mice from beneath the dusty benches, grows like vines into trunk and twig. Through the billows of smoke, the crack of man-made thunder, watch as his muscled arms heave and his subtle fingers tap out magic onto his anvil. And watch, as the impurities are banished and the hellish light simmers to orange and to red and to black, as the god of iron studies his creation through blaze-scorched spectacles glinting in the cool glow of the lantern which once more becomes the only twinkle of light within his crackling realm.

And now the god looks one last time at his world, and clutching his work, he steps out through the shattered boards of the doorway, and in the softness of the sunset we see that he is old. For he is not a god, these powers did not come wholly and naturally to him. He has toiled decades to hone his mastery, a secret and vital lore passed down from his forebears not in cold texts but within the heat of the flames of this now desolate hall. Once, he was sought from afar, had his pick of the smoking cities all across the country, but they are all as silent as his home town now, and there is no one left who wishes to learn what he knows.

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He walks a while along the street with his creation hanging from one sure fist. Below him, hollow warehouses measure the way to the sea. The docks are silted and reeded. A single boat bobs in the gently oncoming tide, crewed only by wind-ruffled gulls. Here and there, fragments of machinery powder the dunes with rust.

At the crossroads, he turns uphill, into town. Emptiness pervades. His echoing footsteps hammer his path between the blank brick apartments. At the corner, bakery shelves await bread but the ovens, like the kilns and furnaces, sit cold. The craftsman moves on with purpose, his face lined deep with shadows from the creases in his brow. He is a man of labour and focus; he does not dwell on the dead town through which he walks.

Listen! The subtle wash of the waves behind us draws down under a growing subterranean rumble from up ahead. The craftsman walks with renewed vigour. There are still some living works here amid this mausoleum of the obsolete.

The clockwork precision of his mind does not fail him now. Will it ever? He has calculated his work and his walk elegantly; by the time he reaches the station, anchored in concrete above the nettles of the wastelands, the train is grinding to a halt at the single platform that remains swept and clean. The other eight lay in a row behind him like tombstones in a morgue, shrouded in dust; a scurry of rats, turning from their retreat at the shriek of the whistle, watch as he sets quickly to his task, stands upon creaking knees and approaches the door of the closest carriage. A button lights in gaudy pink, and the craftsman presses it with one time-chiselled thumb.

The carriage is full of light and the smell of bacon and the chattering of children. He selects a seat furthest from their distraction and settles by the window, brushing filings from his shoulder. And, with a lurch, the train heaves him away to who knows where.

There is an insistent voice calling behind him as they depart, but he cannot buy his ticket yet. He needs to evaluate his creation, the last stage of the process. He cranes his neck to look at the head of the platform through sooty eyes, from where he had kicked the remains of the collapsed sign and afixed his final work.

It is not his best, far from it, but he'd had little time once the notion had struck him. He has just made it as it is. But the sign is square, polished, and the twisted ornaments at its edges crude but obvious. His lettering is large and clear, showing with pride once more the name of the town that had clothed and fed his father and his grandfather and all their scattered families, and it is all their collected pride with which those letters shine. The train may never again pause here, but those travellers speeding past may look out and read the name and know the crumbling ruins for a place where men once lived.

The train is gone into the night. The rats scramble to their own work. And here we remain, you and I, looking out over the roofs leading down to the sea, with only the shrieks of the gulls and the memory of smoke for company.