This story appears in the February 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine. She is lying in a cave, dying. Legs and arms but knobby sticks, Lidia Maiyu is curled up close to the campfire.

In the depths of cave systems is a world with no light and therefore no photosynthesis. Prof Geoff Boxshall, a scientific lead on the Museum's Life in the Dark exhibition, says, 'In a few caves there ...

My headlamp finds him, gray muttonchops curling out from beneath his battered helmet, sitting alone in the blackness along the wall of the cave. “Carry on mate,” growls Sims. “Just resting a ...