I came across a dusty black ringed notebook with yellowed pages. It was in Janet’s handwriting which meant it was nearly illegible. She had many wonderful qualities but penmanship was not one of them. She had taken copious notes on a book entitled The Mummy by E.A. Wallis Bridge.
First notes she made were about the many early names of Egypt, mostly denoting it had dark mud, inundations, and was a land of olives. I’d tell you what the names were but I couldn’t make out Janet’s hieroglyphics.
She wrote several pages on the eighteenth dynasty. She listed many pharaohs and what countries they defeated. One of them was Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh who wore a fake beard. Most of them married their sisters. There was a list of gifts appropriate to give a pharaoh—horses, chariots, collars of gold and tables of cedar. She also listed all the gods with phonetic spellings, and what animals they looked like.
I almost got excited on one page. I thought she wrote lover Egypt. Upon closer examination I realized she meant Lower Egypt.
On another page it looked like she copied a prayer in phonetic hieroglyphics (I don’t know what it was; I’m guessing). I could not quite make out from the translations what the prayer was about, if it was indeed a prayer. Maybe it was a prayer said for the dead, since the title of the book she was reading was The Mummy.
This is what happens when cancer takes away your loved one. It leaves intriguing questions that will never be answered. It just reminds me why I loved her so much.