Thirty hours in the dark, talking

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Some people survive by holding on. Others survive by talking to a voice they cannot see, or by not moving at all for hours while the ice holds. This month's stories come from a collapsed building, an open ocean, and a frozen slide above a mountain dike. All three end with someone still here.

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Thirty hours in the dark

Eastleigh, Nairobi, Kenya · October 2026

Zainab Mohammed heard the noise first and misread it. Shortly before the building above her shop collapsed, she later said, there were loud sounds outside, and she took them for people quarrelling. It was a reasonable guess. This was 9th Street in Eastleigh, a dense commercial neighbourhood east of Nairobi's centre, on a Friday afternoon in late October.

Nearby, in a basement tailor's shop on the same street, Victor Onyango was at work. Above the shops stood an unfinished high-rise — eighteen storeys by most accounts, though published descriptions of its height varied from ten to eighteen. It had no occupation certificate. The ground floor and basement were in commercial use anyway. Eleven shops on the ground floor and in the basement were occupied at the time, Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen would later say.

At about one o'clock the structure failed. It collapsed, burying the shops below and leaning against the building next door hard enough that Nairobi's police chief, Issa Mohamud, would warn that the neighbour might go too. Zainab's husband, Sultan Mohamed, had just left the shop for Friday prayers at a nearby mosque. He came back to a mound of broken slab where the family's livelihood had been standing, to a crowd, and to no way of knowing whether anyone inside was alive.

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Found alive between islands

Between Tarawa and Maiana, Kiribati · October 2026

By the time it was found, the boat had drifted for 41 days. Its motor had developed problems. There was no anchor on board. Without power or an anchor, it could only drift.

Luka Rahan was eighteen years old. In September he set out from northern Bougainville, in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, with his cousin, to fish. Somewhere out on the water the motor stopped being reliable. That is the whole of what has been reported about how it began: two men, a fishing trip, a motor giving trouble, and nothing aboard to hold the hull in place.

No distress call, radio message, beacon or search has been reported. After that, there is little public record of what happened to them. The next confirmed moment comes 41 days later, on a Tuesday afternoon in late October, about 2,000 kilometres from where the boat had started, in the water between the Kiribati atolls of Tarawa and Maiana. A group of Kiribati fishermen came across the drifting boat there. Only one of the two men was still aboard.

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Still Standing on Mount Colden

Mount Colden, Keene, New York · October 2026

The trees were about seven feet away. Branches, handholds, a way off the open rock — seven feet of ice-glazed slab between him and all of it. To reach them he would have to jump. Below him the slide ran down to cliffs, and he judged that a missed jump, or a slip while he stood there, would almost certainly kill him.

So he stayed where he was: a patch of rock roughly one foot deep and three feet long, not a true ledge, just a place where the mountain tilted a little less steeply than everything around it. There was no room to sit down. It was Wednesday, October 21, 2026, on the Trap Dike on Mount Colden, in the Adirondack High Peaks above the town of Keene. The sun was gone, the temperature was falling, and the rock had iced over. Rangers call the route a fourth-class climb; several people have died on it over the years. According to WCAX, the 60-year-old Canadian climber standing on that scrap of stone had lost his crampons on an icy ledge, and the loss left him stranded.

At 6:22 p.m., dispatchers at the state Department of Environmental Conservation office in Ray Brook received a satellite beacon SOS. It was only a signal and a set of coordinates — no call, no text, no explanation. Someone on the edge of the slide had pressed the button.

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Every story is retold from published reporting, linked from each story. Know a story we should tell? Send it to us. Past issues: the archive.