burden. Before he could move on, a crowd of chanting Hindus jostled him against a wall as they poured into a small, garishly decorated temple brimming with poly-colored heathen idols. On either side Hindu fakirs sat listlessly, long white hair streaming down over their streaked faces, their limpid eyes devoid of God's understanding. He shook his head sadly as he made the sign of the cross over them, and found his heart near bursting. On every hand, he told himself, the fields are ripe unto harvest, the flocks wanting a keeper. For every soul in this forgotten land we bring to God and the Church, a hundred, nay a thousand, are born into eternal darkness, damned forever. Our task is overwhelming, even with God's help. He thought of the Holy Church, the Society of Jesus, and their long years of disappointment in India. But now, at last, it seemed their hopes and prayers might be nearing fulfillment. After all the years of humiliation and ignominy, there seemed a chance, a genuine chance, that Arangbar, the Great Moghul himself, would at last consent to be baptized into the Holy Church. After him, all of India would surely soon follow. Father Pinheiro crossed himself again, and prayed silently that God would make him a worthy instrument of His will. The burden of India was by now a Jesuit legend. It had been taken up when the first mission came to the court of Akman over three decades before. And even now the pagan fields of India remained, in many ways, the greatest challenge of the Society of Jesus and the Holy Church. India had, it was true, been held in the grip of Portuguese sea power for many years before the first mission arrived in Agra. But Portuguese arms and trade had not served the work of the Church. They had served the greed of Portuguese merchants and the coffers of Portuguese royalty. The lost souls of India were denied the Grace of the Holy Church. Then, in 1540, a priest named Ignatius Loyola, once a nobleman and a soldier, founded the Society of Jesus, whose dual purpose was to defend the Holy Church against the Protestant Reformation and begin preaching the True Faith to the pagan lands of Asia and the Americas. In 1542 the Society of Jesus reached Portuguese Goa, on the very shores of India, in the person of Francis Xavier, a close friend of Ignatius Loyola's from student days at the University of Paris. With Goa as base of operations, the society had immediately pushed farther eastward, reaching Japan and Macao a few short years later. Paradoxically, it was India itself that had initially eluded their influence. Finally, in 1573, the Great Akman journeyed south and encountered the members of the Society of Jesus for the first time. He was awed by their learning and moral integrity, and soon thereafter he posted an envoy to Goa requesting that a Jesuit mission be sent to his court. Three Jesuit fathers traveled to Fatehpur Sekri.