There were hundreds of corpses washed up on the side of the road; others bobbed past his stranded car, carried by the torrents of floodwater towards the sea.

But what will forever haunt Graham Taylor were the screams and sounds of sobbing that echoed through the dark night from those clinging to life in the upper branches of nearby trees.

The scale of the disaster unleashed on Mozambique by Cyclone Idai remains unknown. But the testimony by Mr Taylor, a stranded motorist who survived, hints at the magnitude of the tragedy unfolding in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Caught in the floods unleashed by Idai after it made landfall near the port of Beira last week, Mr Talyor, a former Zimbabwean farmer living in Mozambique, abandoned his car on Monday and walked 15 miles along a raised road to safety in the village of Nhamatanda.

His six-hour walk revealed a scene of “carnage and death.”

“People were on the rooftops and in the eucalyptus, mango and cashew nut trees,” he said. On dryer land, hundreds of survivors searched in the dark for missing members of their families.