"This the new one?" the intern asked.
"Uh, yeah. Real beaut, huh?" Dr. Cranston said looking up from the clipboard on which he was busy writing.
The awed intern walked around the well-preserved mummy laying on the gurney. "Wow, the linen on this guy looks fresh enough to unwind, no problem," Nick, the curious intern said with a hint of excitement in his voice.
"That's the plan," Dr. Cranston mumbled.
"No joke? Are we really unwrapping this one?" Nick had seen so many mummies go in and out of the lab, but each once could only be x-rayed, cat-scanned or have very small samples taken from it for analysis. Just once he wised they could actually unwrap and see the mummy inside with their own eyes.
"No joke. We start now." Cranston smiled and set the clipboard on the metal desk.
Nick and Cranston donned masks and gloves. Dr. Cranston spent a moment looking this way and that at the wrapped mummy and sighed. "I think we might have to cut some of the strips over here. See where the resin has made the linen hard? I don't think it'll separate."
Nick shrugged. "Still, the majority of it should come off intact."
"We'll see about that the further in we go. The inside layers might be hardened with resin like that section." He pointed to the hardened strips.
Slowly they unwound the bindings beginning at the feet, around and around. Several metal bins were waiting to hold the some four hundred yards of linen they would remove. The more that came off intact, the better.
Around the knees the resin that the ancients had used had hardened the linen into one solid sheet. Dr. Cranston reluctantly pulled out the scissors and cut from underneath trying to preserve the top intact in case of later restoration. It took six hours to gingerly unwrap the first layers. They took a break, grabbing sandwiches and sodas from the machine in the lobby.
)
