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.
“Now we use our spades to try to pry up one end. A quarter inch will do.”
They pried an end up, and Sam held his spade down with one hand and bent to insert a nail sideways between the iron sheet and its stone base. Once one was in, he could insert twenty others without much strain. They repeated the process on the other end of the slab. Albrecht said, “Your theory is sound. Let’s hope your rollers are big enough.”
Sam knelt at one side of the slab of iron and moved it easily aside, rolling on the sixpenny nails. The three looked down through the opening with their night vision goggles. Albrecht said, “This isn’t what I expected. It looks like a stone room.”
“Let’s hope it’s not an air-raid shelter,” said Remi. “Or a septic tank.”
Sam said, “I can see part of the floor.” He took off his belt and slipped it over the handle of his spade and through the buckle. “Each of you hold one end of the spade and I’ll lower myself down a bit and jump.”
Remi put her hand on his shoulder. “Sam, I weigh eighty pounds less than you do.” She took the end of the belt and sat at the edge of the opening. She pushed off, rappelling down a few feet, then extended her arms and hung from the belt. Then she dropped into the darkness.
They heard the soft thud of her feet hitting the stone floor. There was silence as she walked into the part of the stone room where they couldn’t see her.
“Remi, talk,” Sam said. “Just so I know it wasn’t full of carbon monoxide, or fifty-year-old nerve gas.”
“It’s full of . . . nothing.”
“You mean grave robbers have been here?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Grave robbers are messy. Wait. There’s another big piece of iron. This one’s only tarnished, not much rust. It’s got something carved in it. Looks like Latin.”
“The Romans are my regular specialty,” said Albrecht. “I’ve got to see it.”
“Here. Hold on,” said Sam. “Exactly the way Remi did it.”
Albrecht held the belt and eased himself over the edge, then held on and rappelled a few steps, hung, then dropped the last couple feet.
Sam put the three spades together like spoons, slipped his belt around them and through the buckle, and propped them across a corner of the opening. He then lowered himself down.
The room was made of big river sandstone, worked roughly into rectangular blocks. They had been put together with mortar, so the room was waterproof.
Sam found Albrecht engrossed, standing beside Remi with his night vision goggles on and staring at the big piece of iron that had been burnished and then had Roman letters carved deeply into it. “Can you translate for us?” asked Sam.
“‘You have found my secret but have not begun to learn it. Know that treasures are buried in sadness, never in joy. I did not bury treasure once. I buried treasure five times. To find the last, you must reach the first. The fifth is the place where the world was lost.’”
Sam said, “Remi, your phone has a flash. You’d better get a shot of this.”
“But somebody could see it.”
“Unless you want to carry that chunk of iron to Szeged, we’ve got to chance it.”
She took off her night vision goggles, raised her cell phone, and took the picture. Then she said, “I’ll send this to Selma as soon as we’re aboveground and can send a signal.”
They all heard a sound like footsteps coming from above and froze in place, barely breathing. There was a voice, male, speaking quietly as he walked. Then someone laughed once, like a cough.
Sam jumped up, caught the end of the belt, and pulled it overhand. The spades came with it and dropped into his arms. They made a slight metallic noise, but he hoped it hadn’t been loud enough to reach the people above. He, Albrecht, and Remi crouched in the far end of the room, away from the entrance, waiting for the intruders to pass by the hole they had dug or come closer to examine it.
As the three watched, the steel slab was pushed across the opening, narrowing the faint rectangle of moonlight until it became a slit and then disappeared.
KISKUNHALAS, HUNGARY
THERE WAS THE SOUND OF DIRT BEING SHOVELED ONTO the iron slab that sealed the stone crypt. The shoveling continued. The first few loads of dirt were louder, and the ones after that quieter, but it was clear the dirt they had removed to dig down to the crypt was all being returned to the hole to cover it.
Sam whispered, “Stay still, and don’t use more oxygen than we have to.”
The three sat on the floor of the crypt, leaning against the stone walls, waiting. A half hour passed, then an hour.
“Do you hear anything?” whispered Remi.
“No,” Sam said. “I think they’ve gone.” Sam stood and moved to the space just below the slab of iron. “I think we can get out.”
“How?” asked Albrecht.
“We dug down about eight feet. The hole was eight feet wide and ten feet long—six hundred forty cubic feet. This room is ten feet wide, ten feet long, and ten feet deep. That’s a thousand cubic feet. We can let the dirt fall in here. We’ll spread it on the stone floor as it comes in and it will raise us as it does.”
“So simple,” said Albrecht. “You think like a Roman.”
“I just hope they haven’t left guards on the surface to watch the site,” Remi said softly.
Albrecht said, “I say we take the chance. We breathe about sixteen times a minute and consume about twenty-four liters of air. We’d better get started.”
“Right,” said Remi. “Let’s lift Sam up to reach the slab.”
“No,” said Sam. “It would take both of you to lift me, but I can lift you both. If I brace myself against the wall, you can each step up on one of my knees, then to my shoulder. Push your shovel blade between the wall and the iron slab and pry it open an inch or two. That should be enough.”