(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.) The Maneaters of Savo. Now, The Maneaters of Savo, I'm just going to give you a brief overview of the book. Because it's a great book, if you want to, if you like action and adventure and safari type stuff, which, you know, I know all the ladies are on to that. But, if you're interested in stuff like that, it's a pretty interesting book. It's really well written, and the guy that wrote the book's name is John Henry Patterson. That's a tough sounding name. That's actually a name that I think that somebody should pick in this church. Maybe not the Patterson part, but the John Henry. So, John Henry is a tough sounding name. But anyway, so, John Henry Patterson was like a colonel in the army, and he was picked by the British government to be the engineer and the boss of a railroad project that was building a bridge in Kenya and to Uganda. So, he shows up and, I'm just going to, you know, I don't want to ruin the whole book if you want to read it sometime, but there's a lot of cool different other aspects that I'm not going to cover in the sermon, of course. But, basically he showed up and he had half Muslims there working for him. And then he showed up, and then there was also people they called coolies, or Hindu believing Indians. So, you have two different religions there as his workforce. And he was, you know, of course, he was employed by the British Empire. He was a British soldier of some sort, so a colonel. So, three weeks into the project where he's trying to build this railroad bridge over the top of this river, two lions show up and start eating people out of their tents. You like the book so far? Pretty interesting, right? Two lions show up and they're maneless lions. They don't have manes. They're only found in that part of Africa where they don't have manes. What else do you know about, they're males. What else do you know about lions? Usually the female is the hunter, right? The female hunts, and then the male protects the children while the females go out and hunt and bring daddy home to dinner, right? So, already you already have an abnormal thing going on. You have maneless male lions that, by the way, are 9 foot 8 and 9 foot 6 from the tip of their tail to the end of their head. And they're 3 foot 11 to the top of their shoulders, so they're about 4 feet tall. They're pretty stout young lions, okay? And they are fairly young lions. But one thing, so they're hunting people. First of all, they normally hunt like caribou and things like that. They're not normally hunting men. Normally that's not part of their diet, but these ones have a particular taste for men and people that are working on this project. So, there's about 8,000 workers. And it's spread from one part of the, from the beginning of the railroad to even past where they're building the bridge. And so, every night, these lions, they can hear them roaring outside of the camp and just toying with people. And then they would show up and eat people. The first night, Colonel Patterson thought that, because somebody, they said, oh, a lion killed somebody in a tent. And he was like, oh, yeah, sure. He was thinking that one of the people killed the other person for their money or something like that, because apparently that kind of stuff was going on. So, they also plotted to kill this colonel later on in the story and were about to murder him, but didn't end up going through with the, someone told them about the plan to kill him and all this other stuff. But back to the lions. So, the lions are taking people out of their tents every night. And this went on for nine months. And so, he took it upon them as a personal, since he was in the leadership, he wanted to make sure that he was the one that took care of the problem, which that's a good leader. So, he was staying up all night long, setting traps with goats and blood and all this other stuff to try to trap these lions. But every time, you know, the lions would strike someplace and they would kill somebody, and then he'd set up the next night thinking, well, they might come back and I'll make sure that everything's, you know, ready so that I can just shoot them, right? So, but what the lions just would eat people from clear across, like two miles away at a different part of the camp. So, basically he's just playing this cat and mouse game with the lions, no pun intended. But he's playing this game with them and he's losing. Every night, people are getting eaten. And it comes to a certain part where they just basically said, look, we're not working here anymore, we're done. You know, because they were scared. You know, obviously, and I would be scared too because here's the thing about these lions. So, there's these thorns in Africa. Who's been to Africa before? All right, you've been to Africa, they have these big long thorns and what they did is they make these like thorn hedges around their tents and things like that. But these lions just didn't care. They would go through the thorns and scratch themselves up to get to the people and then once they got them, see, lions didn't eat their prey right on the spot. They would drag them through these thorn bushes, screaming all the way to wherever. They would eat their victims like two or three miles away. And so they're dragging them through that and then they're dragging them all the way and then they would eat them, everything but the head and some other parts, right? So, they're pretty nasty lions. So, I just think it's, you know, it's an interesting story because it just shows you, you know, I started to think, well, why are these lions acting abnormally? Why are they acting the way that they are because they're not acting as normal lions would? And I just thought, well, might have something to do with, you know, 3,500 Hindus and 3,500 Muslims all being at the same camp. I don't know, maybe trying to halt the British government from making this railway, I don't know what the purpose of it but I do believe it probably was of God. You know, I can't prove that but what I can prove is that God does use beasts of the earth to punish people with. And He uses these kind of beasts of the earth against saved and unsaved people also.