Prisoners of the Sun (originally Le Temple du Soleil) is one of a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero.
Prisoners of the Sun is the fourteenth in the series. It continues the story begun in The Seven Crystal Balls.
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
The Storyline
Tintin and the captain go to Peru in South America to look for Professor Calculus, who has been kidnapped because he put on the Inca Rascar Capac's bracelet. After an eventful trip involving Tintin nearly being thrown off the side of a cliff from a runaway railway coach, they end up meeting a small Indian boy who helps them find the entrance to the Temple of the Sun, a place in the mountains where a splinter group of Incas reside in solitude. They find Calculus is to be sacrificed for putting on the bracelet, and they work out a plan involving a solar eclipse to stop it from happening. Afterwards, the leader of the Incas tells them the "magic liquid" mentioned in the preceding volume was a coca-derivative used to hypnotize the explorers as a method of punishment, as the Incas believed they were commiting sacrilege.
This temple built in 1278 CE by the Ganga King Narasimha Deva is one of the grandest temples of India and was referred to as the Black Pagoda.
The Melakkadambur Shiva temple, built in the form of a chariot during the age of Kulottunga Chola I (1075-1120), is the earliest of this kind, and is still in a well preserved state.
It is believed that this temple set the pace for the ratha (chariot) vimana temples in India, as a distant descendant of Kulottunga I on the female line, and thefamous Eastern Ganga ruler Narasimha Deva, built the SunTemple at Konark in the form of a chariot in the 13th century.
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