‘His fore-paws were spread out and he lashed the ground with his tail’

During a tornado, that formidable Victorian Mary Kingsley encountered a leopard. "The massive, mighty trees were waving like a wheat-field in an autumn gale in England," she reports in Travels in West Africa (1897).

"The tornado shrieked like ten thousand vengeful demons. The great trees creaked and groaned and strained against it and their bush-rope cables groaned and smacked like whips, and ever and anon a thundering crash with snaps like pistol shots told that they and their mighty tree had strained and struggled in vain. The fierce rain came in a roar, tearing to shreds the leaves and the blossoms and deluging everything.