“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. My mother was a pahareen, but my father came from Amritzar—by Jandiala,” said Kim, oiling his ready tongue for the needs of the Road. “Jandiala—Jullundur? Oho! Then we be neighbours in some sort, as it were.” He nodded tenderly to the wailing child in his arms. “Whom dost thou serve?” “A most holy man at the Temple of the Tirthankers.” “They are all most holy and—most greedy,” said the Jat with bitterness. “I have walked the pillars and trodden the temples till my feet are flayed, and the child is no whit better. And the mother being sick too ... Hush, then, little one ... We changed his name when the fever came. We put him into girl’s clothes. There was nothing we did not do, except—I said to his mother when she bundled me off to Benares—she should have come with me—I _said_ Sakhi Sarwar Sultan would serve us best. We know His generosity, but these down-country Gods are strangers.” The child turned on the cushion of the huge corded arms and looked at Kim through heavy eyelids. “And was it all worthless?” Kim asked, with easy interest. “All worthless—all worthless,” said the child, lips cracking with fever. “The Gods have given him a good mind, at least” said the father proudly. “To think he should have listened so cleverly. Yonder is thy Temple. Now I am a poor man—many priests have dealt with me—but my son is my son, and if a gift to thy master can cure him—I am at my very wits’ end.”