I go to Prayag [Allahabad] for the fifth time--seeking the Road to Enlightenment.

Of what faith art thou ?' 'I too am a Seeker,' said Kim, using one of the lama's pet words.
'Though'-- he forgot his Northern dress for the moment--'though Allah alone knoweth what I seek.' The old fellow slipped the bairagi's crutch under his armpit and sat down on a patch of ruddy leopard's skin as Kim rose at the call for the Benares train.
'Go in hope, little brother,' he said.

'It is a long road to the feet of the One; but thither do we all travel.' Kim did not feel so lonely after this, and ere he had sat out twenty miles in the crowded compartment, was cheering his neighbours with a string of most wonderful yarns about his own and his master's magical gifts.
Benares struck him as a peculiarly filthy city, though it was pleasant to find how his cloth was respected.

At least one-third of the population prays eternally to some group or other of the many million deities, and so reveres every sort of holy man.

Kim was guided to the Temple of the Tirthankars, about a mile outside the city, near Sarnath, by a chance-met Punjabi farmer--a Kamboh from Jullundur-way who had appealed in vain to every God of his homestead to cure his small son, and was trying Benares as a last resort.
'Thou art from the North ?' he asked, shouldering through the press of the narrow, stinking streets much like his own pet bull at home.
'Ay, I know the Punjab.