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Zurab was wearing gloves on his hands to protect them from blisters as he swung his pick carefully, trying not to hit the floor above him in the cathedral. As soon as he loosened a sizeable amount of dirt, Vano came in behind him and put a large hose in the pit. The hose was part of a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucked the loose dirt and small rocks out the ground and threw the debris in another section of the crawl space.
“How far down do you think we are?” Zurab asked.
Vano pulled out his tape measure, placed it in the pit and said, “Almost three feet.”
“Let’s take a break,” Zurab said as he crawled over to grab his lunch pail. He opened it up and pulled out a sandwich and thought nothing of eating it with his dirty hands.”
“What the hell are doing?” Vano asked.
“I’m eating, what does it look like?”
“I thought we were going to go up top and wash our hands,” Vano said.
“Sure, and risk all that money just so you could eat a clean sandwich, be a man, a little dirt isn’t going to kill you,” Zurab said half laughing at his finicky friend.
Vano slowly started eating the sandwich wondered whether the nourishment was worth the mental anguish of doing something he never had to do before.
After they dug for another three hours, Vano measured the hole and they were down about five-feet as Zurab lay down exhaustedly on the side of the hole.
“I didn’t know whether I should tell you now or when we get down another five feet,” Vano said, “But the deeper we go, we have to keep expanding the hole out more as we get to the bottom.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Zurab said, infuriated that his workload may have just doubled or even tripled.
“You saw it on the screen, that’s a coffin down there, and we have to clean out enough room so we could open it.”
Zurab shook his head in disbelief.
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