The Great Pyramid, Giza · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone comes to Giza for the sheer impossible bulk of the Great Pyramid, six million tonnes of limestone stacked against the desert, the last of the seven wonders of the ancient world still standing, and almost nobody knows that the pyramid they are photographing is not quite the shape it appears to be. From the ground each face looks like one smooth triangle. It is not. Every one of the four faces is very slightly hollowed, folded inward down its centre line, so the Great Pyramid actually has eight sides, not four. The dip is tiny, less than a metre across a base that runs some 230 metres a side, and for most of the day and most of the year you would never catch it. Here is the part I love. On the mornings of the spring and autumn equinox, as the sun climbs, the light falls so that half of each face lies in shadow and half stays lit, and the hidden crease down the middle suddenly shows itself, splitting every side in two. It was caught from the air in 1940 by a British pilot, P. Groves, who photographed the shadow line, though the surveyor Flinders Petrie had already measured the hollow decades earlier, in 1883. Nobody is quite sure whether Khufu's builders did it on purpose or whether it is the ghost of some construction trick, but there it is, forty five centuries old and still keeping its shape a secret. The guidebooks tell you how many blocks there are and send you off to ride a camel. They rarely tell you to come back at the equinox, at first light, and watch a four sided pyramid quietly turn into an eight sided one.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.