Polish National Museum in Warsaw

This guide to the Polish National Museum in Warsaw follows a race against rising water in the nineteen sixties, when Egypt's Aswan High Dam threatened to drown a stretch of Nubian desert along the Nile. It traces Professor Kazimierz Michalowski's Polish archaeological team as they uncover a buried medieval cathedral at a site called Faras, its walls covered in paintings some thirteen hundred years old, under UNESCO's call for rescuers from around the world. Look closely at the faces nearest you: robed queen mothers in horned crowns, a bishop named Petros, a saint spearing a Roman emperor.