Jebel Barkal is a lone butte of sandstone a hundred metres high standing over the Nile at Karima, in the Northern State of Sudan, which the priests of Egypt read as the home of the god Amun, with a pinnacle at its corner that they saw as a cobra, a king or a phallus depending on the angle, and its temples and 25 pyramids lie at the foot, walked among on sand with nothing casting shade. The pharaohs of the New Kingdom built a temple of Amun under the cliff around 1450 BC and gave it the same name as the great temple at Thebes, Ipet-Sut, treating it as its twin 1,260 kilometres upriver, and when Egypt withdrew the kings of Kush made the mountain their holy place; the Great Amun Temple is crossed between column stubs worn to knee height and pylons reduced to their footings, the temple of Mut was hacked straight into the cliff, so its painted chambers are cool and dim while the plain outside bakes, and the pinnacle changes as it is walked around, which is exactly why the ancients trusted it, a rock that showed the crowned king with the cobra on his brow. The pyramids on the sand west of the mountain are a ten-minute walk, steep and small, holding almost nobody famous, since the great kings of Kush lie at Nuri across the river and later at Meroë.
From the Nile the mesa reads exactly as it did to the boat crews three thousand years ago, a flat block of rock above the palm belt with the pinnacle standing off its corner. The stone keeps no season, and the site is walkable from November to February, when the summer heat past forty degrees and the dust walls of May are gone; the town of Karima at its foot has a museum and a guesthouse, and the war has closed the country. Jebel Barkal is a mountain two empires agreed was holy, and the rock at its corner is why.