Suddenly all of the metal detector’s readings changed. Sam saw the needle bury itself at the upper end. He moved a few steps and the needle dropped again. He came at it from the side and got a similar reading. He stood up straight and waved to the others, then knelt down. Remi and Albrecht came from their stations and knelt beside him.

“Is this it?” whispered Albrecht.

“It could be a lot of things,” Sam said. “All I know is that it’s metal and that it’s big.”

Remi rose and went to the end of the row, then came back with the spades. They began to dig, each moving apart from the others and digging quickly in the sandy soil. The work went steadily, and soon they were down about five feet, lifting each shovelful up above their shoulders to throw aside. Sam’s shovel rang out as it hit metal. A second later, Remi’s scraped a smooth, hard surface.

They set aside their spades and used their hands to clear the dirt off a metal plate. It was a flat rectangle, perhaps six feet long and three feet wide. Albrecht whispered, “There’s rust. The material is an impure form of iron. This could be the lid of the sarcophagus.”

“Let’s clear around it to get a better look,” Remi said.

Sam and Remi moved to the ends and began digging around the outside, so Albrecht began on the long side. They dug in silence, the suspense goading them to work harder and faster. But as they dug, each of them hit a second surface, just below the iron slab, that seemed to be stone.

Sam said, “Let’s see if we can budge it.”

All three stood at one side of the iron slab and used their spades to try to make it move. They strained, tried inserting the tips of their spades under the edge and pushing. The slab budged a fraction of an inch. “It moves. Let’s dig a space beside it and push the lid in it.”

They increased the size of the hole by three feet so that there was an empty space for the lid. They pushed again but made little progress. “Let’s try something else,” Sam said.

He climbed out and went to the nearest row of grapevines, where there were wooden stakes with sixpenny nails driven partway in to hold the wires for the vines. He began to pull the nails out. Sam looked closely at each one, twirled it in his fingers. He put some in his pocket and rejected some, pushing them back into the holes in the stakes.

“How many do you want?” asked Remi.

“Thirty or forty. Don’t take any that are bent.”

Albrecht and Remi collected nails until Sam said, “That’s enough to test the theory.” They all got back in the hole.