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.

On Saturday morning local time, a powerful earthquake registering 6.9 on the Richter scale rocked the vicinity of Papua New Guinea, according to reports from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). This ...