The temple where the sun never touches the god of darkness

Here is the Abu Simbel detail I cannot stop thinking about, and it is not the four giants out front. Everyone knows the temple for those colossal seated Ramesses, each one the height of a house, cut straight into a Nubian cliff above the water. Hardly anyone is told about the two mornings a year when the place quietly becomes a clock.

Right at the back, sixty metres deep in the rock, four statues sit in a row. Around 21 February and 21 October the rising sun runs the whole length of that dark corridor and lights up three of them, Amun, Ramesses and Ra-Horakhty, for about twenty minutes. The fourth, Ptah, is the god of the underworld and of darkness, and he was placed so that the sunlight never reaches him at all. Three and a half thousand years, and he has stayed in shadow the entire time.

I painted the temple in watercolour and ink, warm sandstone against a hard blue sky, and the whole time I kept thinking about that one figure left in the dark on purpose. The alignment was so exact that when the temple was sawn into blocks and lifted to safety above Lake Nasser in the 1960s, the sunlit dates slipped by a single day, the one small thing the engineers could not quite carry across. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  Abu Simbel, Egypt · Travel Poster