  January 1938 saw the couple boarding the Orient Line’s S.S. Ormonde in Sydney, carrying large rucksacks. The Ormonde was bound for London via Colombo, Suez, Naples and Toulon. In Colombo, Prior took the opportunity to visit ‘a Hindoo temple, a Buddhist one, a Mahommedan mosque, a Roman Catholic church &amp; an Anglican church’. He was, at this stage of his life, obsessed with religion. He believed in the virgin birth and the voice of the devil, and was a devout Presbyterian (Prior 1940). His impressions after his first encounter with extreme religious diversity were, he said, ‘very vivid, but very confused’. He described the Anglican church as ‘a foreign growth’, and what he called ‘the R. C. place’ was, he said, not ‘sufficiently distinguishable from the idolatries around it’. He decided that ‘Buddhism was a much saner sort of religion than either Hinduism or Mohammedanism’, and that ‘the Mahommedans are a particularly arrogant crowd, &amp; obviously think they’re the lords of creation’.