[apillar]

Not to nitpick but shouldn't the story say he found his wife's decomposed body, mummified tends to give the impression that the body was artificially preserved by some sort of outside process, which I seriously doubt.

[Jonty30]

Decomposition implies that the flesh parts of the body were disintegrating, with the end point of being a skeleton. Mummification implies that the body was was drying out, but the flesh wasn’t disintegrating the way it would under decomposition.

Natural mummification can occur, under dry and hot conditions, where the water is evaporated from the body, leaving the fleshy parts shrunken, but not disintegrated.

[Boogieman]

No, under certain conditions mummification can occur completely naturally, and that is the correct term for it.