 How did Loy Chuk's team find Ned at the bottom of the Pit?
A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. 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. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. 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. The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. 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. A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details.
 The workers found him during an excavation.
 The workers noticed red debris.  The workers noticed a flaky rust formation.  The workers noticed a glint of metal.  The workers found him during an excavation.