ypsi~dixit

"There have been many stories told over the years about the mummy trade. Some are undoubtedly true, but others are certainly apocryphal. The great American humorist Mark Twain seems responsible for one of the most tantalizing. While writing Innocents Abroad in the 1860s, Twain journeyed to Egypt, where he caught wind of a story that clearly captured his fancy. The trains that puffed across the Egyptian countryside, he wrote, were powered neither by cords of wood nor buckets of coal, as they were elsewhere at the time. The Egyptians had substituted something far more novel. "I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton of by the graveyard for that purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, "D--m these plebians, they don't burn worth a cent--pass out a King!"

"So striking was this brief sketch that Twain's tale has lodged itself firmly in mummy lore. No mummy expert has ever been able to authenticate the story, however, although several have tried and written about their frustration. Twain seems to be the only published source--and a rather suspect one at that, given his penchant for fiction and his own published disclaimer. "Stated to me for a fact," he observed of the train tale in a note to Innocents Abroad, "I only tell it as I got it. I am willing to believe it. I can believe anything."

--The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead by Heather Pringle