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.
“I was making bad weather of it, and climbing up over a lot of rocks out of a gully bottom where I had been half drowned in a stream, and getting my head to the level of a block of rock I observed right in front of my eyes, broadside on, maybe a yard off, certainly not more, a big leopard.
His fore-paws were spread out in front of him and he lashed the ground with his tail, and I grieve to say, in the face of that awful danger – I don’t mean me, but the tornado – that depraved creature swore, softly but repeatedly, and profoundly.”
She ducked below the rocks. “My feelings tell me he remained there 12 months but my calmer judgement puts the time down at 20 minutes.” A cautious peep confirmed he was gone. “He had moved off in one of those weird lulls which you get in a tornado, when for a few seconds the wild herd of hurrying winds seem to have lost themselves.”
