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Bishop Latour, a French appointee sent from Rome, confronts Padre Antonio José Martínez, the powerful native-born Hispano priest of Taos who has served the Pueblo and Mexican communities for decades, keeps a mistress, and defends local customs such as married clergy. Latour removes him and installs his own priest, and Martínez goes into schism with his own congregation.
The novel makes Latour genuinely curious about, respectful of, and even moved by Pueblo, Navajo, and Hispano ways. His sympathy stays aesthetic and personal and never becomes structural: he admires Native reverence for the land and the Hopi and Navajo refusal to disturb it, yet he never doubts that the diocese, Rome, and French clergy should govern souls. Affection for the colonized coexists comfortably with an unexamined right to rule them.
Latour perceives Native people through the same register he uses for mesas and weather: ancient, silent, reverent, and ultimately unknowable. In the snake-cave scene with his Pecos guide Jacinto, he senses a depth in Native religion he cannot and does not try to enter. Casting the other as mysterious landscape lets the observer feel reverence while exempting himself from real understanding, and it leaves Native people as backdrop to the European protagonist's inner life.
Latour builds his Santa Fe cathedral in French Midi Romanesque style from golden local stone, with a French architect, beside adobe churches built by local hands. The building fuses the native material with a foreign form and foreign authority. Its message is that the land may supply the substance but Europe supplies the design, and the local is honored as raw material rather than as author.