A Mummy Story
Written by Bob Yates - During trip to Egypt with A-Z Tours
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When Bob was in Egypt he recalled what he had seen as a child and retells this amazing story.When I was just a wee tot living in Toronto in the late 1940's, my mother and father and sister would drag me along with them to Niagara Falls every summer.
Now, what was really special about the trip was that we did not go by car - we didn't even own one at that time - but by boat! Yes, the old Cayuga would leave the dock early in the morning and sail due south across Lake Ontario to Niagara-on-the-Lake. Then we would grab a bus up to the Falls and spend the day there before reversing the process at night.
Now I remember mother always packed egg sandwiches and we would buy soft drinks to wash them down with.We would go out on the international bridge to stand with one foot on each side of the border, stand right at the upper edge of the falls to feel the spray coming off it, and take a ride on the Maid of the Mist.
But the real treat was a visit, every year, to a little museum that had all sorts of weird little things in it. One of these oddities was a real Egyptian mummy - honest! this is a true story! - and I can remember clearly how we would look at its head and laugh at its hooked nose and dried skin.Then my dad would take me down to the other end of it and one by one we would count its 10 splayed toes - and we did this every year until I could easily count to 10, even without using a poor old man's toes to help me. Yes, the mummy was a man, and you might well ask how I knew this fact. Well, I didn't then, but this story has a real twist ending to it, wouldn't you figure...
Fast forward to the Luxor Museum located in the ancient city of Thebes, Egypt,the day before Halloween, 2004. Here I am touring and spot a sign pointing to a new room containing an important mummy recently acquired by the museum - that of Rameses the 1st, the Grandfather of Rameses the Great! Up the stairs into the room I go, and what do I see staring right at me - THOSE 10 TOES!!! It's my old pal from Niagara Falls - I would recognize those digits anywhere in the world! Even the hooked nose was familiar...
Seems that a scholar visiting the little museum in Niagara Falls suspected that the mummy there might be real, and famous, and after doing some research he stated that it was in fact Rameses I. Then a museum in Atlanta bought the mummy from the closing museum in NF and donated it to the government of Egypt.
That's how I came face-to-face, so to speak, with an old friend from my childhood 50 years on and half-way around the world, almost. WOW.
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