Travelling in the Key of Life

The Art:
May 1969 National Geographic magazine cover.

The Story:
When I was 8 years old, I read this issue of National Geographic at the cottage where I spent every summer, and without knowing it then, the traveller in me was born.

Reading about the temples at Abu Simbel kindled a fascination with Egypt that exists to this day. It  captured my imagination and admiration for the engineers both past and present who took on the herculean task of first building and then 5000 years later, moving, these spectacular temples.

Determined to one day visit this incredible site, I waited more than 20 years before realizing that dream.


So when my tour bus pulled up to the temple grounds just after the crack of dawn, I wasted no time eating my boxed breakfast snack – I went straight to the temple door where I found this gentleman, about to open the greatest of all monuments to Ramses the Great with, you guessed it, an ankh.

That Key of Life ushered me into the dimly-lit interior of a pharoah's temple, where for half an hour, I sat with the entire place to myself, taking in the hieroglyphs and the colossal carved columns with only the sound of the odd bird flying into the chamber to break the silence.


It isn't often that the imagination of an 8 year old is exceeded by the wonder of reality.

Which is why, when I got back to Toronto, I scoured the used book stores on Yonge Street until I found this old magazine.  And I read it all over again.

The Fact:
After exploring the temple be sure to go inside the 'mountain' into which these transplanted rooms have been relocated. You'll see the temple has actually been reconstructed inside a concrete dome disguised to look like a rock face. 5000+ years of some pretty impressive engineering.