Lakshmana lies badly wounded on the battlefield, and only a healing herb from a far-off mountain can save him before sunrise. Hanuman flies north to fetch it. But when he gets there, he can't tell which herb is the right one.
Karna was born wearing golden armour and earrings that kept him safe from any weapon. He also made a promise never to refuse anyone who asked him for a gift at midday. One day, a visitor comes to test that promise.
In 1942, a young ship's steward named Poon Lim found himself alone on a tiny raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He would stay there for more than four months.
A runaway slave hiding in a desert cave meets a lion with a wounded paw. Years later, in a roaring arena in Rome, they meet again.
A shepherd's son from Ethiopia was added to his Olympic team at the last minute. On a torchlit night in Rome in 1960, he ran the marathon with no shoes on.
At sixteen, Sudha Chandran was a rising young classical dancer. Then an accident on the road took her leg. Everyone assumed her dancing days were over. She did not.
The grandson of enslaved people, born to a poor farming family in Alabama, went to the 1936 Olympic Games in Hitler's Germany and won four gold medals.
In July 1969, three men rode a giant rocket towards the Moon. With alarms sounding and fuel running low, two of them flew a fragile craft down to its grey surface, while the world held its breath.
The daughter of poor farmers in the hills of Manipur hid her boxing from her own father. She went on to become a world champion again and again, even after becoming a mother of three.
A greedy lion makes the animals of the forest send him one of them every day for his dinner. When it is the little rabbit's turn, he walks very, very slowly, because he has a plan.
On a spring evening in Vienna in 1824, a packed theatre heard a new symphony for the first time. The man who wrote it could not hear a single note.
An old emperor gives every child in the land a single seed. Whoever grows the finest flower, he says, will rule after him. One boy's seed will not grow.
In 1848, a young woman in Pune walked to school every morning while people on the street threw mud and stones at her. Savitribai Phule kept walking, and opened the door to education for the girls of India.
Florence Nightingale was expected to marry well and live a quiet, comfortable life. Instead she walked the wards of a filthy army hospital at night, and then used numbers to change how the world cares for the sick.
In 1940, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were trapped on the beaches of northern France. To help bring them home, an extraordinary fleet set out across the Channel, of fishing boats, ferries, yachts and pleasure launches.
Country people in England said that milkmaids never caught smallpox. In 1796, a village doctor decided to find out whether they were right, and began the story of vaccines.
In the winter of 1925, a deadly illness broke out in a small town in Alaska, cut off by snow and ice. The medicine that could stop it was nearly a thousand kilometres away. Only dogs could bring it.
In 1947, six men lashed nine balsa logs together and pushed off from the coast of Peru, heading for islands thousands of kilometres across the Pacific. Experts said the raft would sink within weeks.
A twelve-year-old boy in Louisville lost his new bicycle and walked, furious, into a basement boxing gym. He became Muhammad Ali, and one day he risked everything for what he believed.
During the Second World War, the people of a poor mountain village in France opened their doors to strangers on the run. They hid thousands, and hardly ever spoke of it afterwards.
In the summer of 1940, a crowd of desperate refugees gathered at the gate of a small Japanese consulate in Lithuania. The diplomat inside had to choose between his orders and his conscience.
In 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by Antarctic ice. Twenty-eight men were stranded at the bottom of the world. Every one of them came home.
In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi set out on foot to walk 385 kilometres to the sea, to break an unjust law by picking up salt. The whole world watched.
As a child, Wilma Rudolph wore a metal brace on her leg after polio. At twenty, she became the fastest woman in the world.
In 1938 a young London stockbroker cancelled a skiing holiday and went to Prague instead. He told almost nobody what he did there, for fifty years.
For 28 years, a wall divided Berlin. On 9 November 1989, a confused answer at a press conference sent thousands of people to the border, and history changed overnight.
In June 2018, twelve boys from a Thai football team and their coach were trapped by floodwater deep inside a cave. The world came together to bring them out.
In occupied Warsaw, social worker Irena Sendler helped smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto, and buried their real names in jars so they could one day be found.
Helen Keller could not see or hear, and had no words for anything, until a determined young teacher spelled into her hand at a water pump in Alabama.
In 2011, Arunima Sinha lost her leg after being thrown from a moving train. Two years later she stood on the summit of Mount Everest.
Two tricksters sell a vain emperor cloth that only clever people can see. Everyone pretends, until one child says what they all can see.
In January 2009, a passenger jet lost both engines minutes after take-off from New York. The pilots had about three and a half minutes to decide what to do.
As a girl in a small town in Haryana, Kalpana Chawla watched planes and drew spaceships. She became the first woman born in India to go to space.
On Christmas Eve 1971, a plane broke apart over the Amazon rainforest. Seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke fell three kilometres, still strapped to her seat, and survived.
On 1 December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat. Her quiet "no" sparked a year-long boycott that helped change America.
Anaya had planned her whole future around one letter. When it said no, she discovered that the door she'd been staring at was not the only one in the room.
Tavi didn't mean to break his sister's kite. Hiding it seemed easy, but keeping a secret turned out to be much heavier than telling the truth.
In April 1970, an explosion left three astronauts nearly 200,000 miles from Earth in a damaged spacecraft. What followed was one of the greatest problem-solving efforts in history.
At Christmas 1914, in the first winter of the First World War, soldiers on opposite sides of the trenches laid down their weapons and met as human beings, if only for a little while.
