 How did Ned become a mummy?
A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details.
 A combination of the alkali and mud his body had been soaked in. Also, the years of dryness after the world became a desert.
 Loy Chuk's workers wrapped Ned's body in strips of cloth to preserve it in transport.  The earth became a desert wasteland. All the moisture was leached from the corpse.  A combination of the alkali and mud his body had been soaked in. Also, the years of dryness after the world became a desert.  The body had been devoid of moisture for a million years.