Death Comes for the Archbishop

After a chilly, uncomfortable night, Latour wakes up early. Latour and Jacinto share a loaf of bread and pot of black coffee and get on the road by four a.m. But despite their early start, the men still get caught in a snowstorm, with flakes so thick that the landscape around them becomes impossible to see. Eventually, Jacinto instructs Latour to leave the mules, and the two men set off on foot to some mysterious location.

After an exhausting hour, the men arrive at their destination: a cave that looks like stone lips, protected from the storm. Jacinto helps Latour get into the cave, which is freezing cold and feels like a gothic church. The only light comes from a gap nearly 20 feet above them. But despite these harsh surroundings, Jacinto is in no rush to make a fire. Instead, he sits down, solemn; when Latour wonders why he does not make a fire, Jacinto explains that he has regrets about bringing the priest here. “This place is used by my people for ceremonies and is known only to us,” Jacinto admits. “When you go out from here, you must forget.”

Jacinto then begins to build a fire on the already-existing fire pit, warming Latour and purifying the cave’s bad smell. At first, Latour thinks the loud vibrating noise in his head is a swarm of bees—but when he asks Jacinto about it, Jacinto uses his knife to dig a hole in one of the clay walls. Latour listens through the hole and hears rushing water, a river “moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock.” Latour reflects that this sound is “terrible.”

Latour brings out bread and goat cheese, surreptitiously drinking a sip of whisky. As they eat, Jacinto reveals that he feels lucky to have made it; when they first set out, he was not sure whether he could find this place. When the two men say goodnight, Latour resolves to stay up and listen to the river again. But Jacinto spends the whole night against the rock, pressed as close to the hole in the wall as he can get.

The next day, Jacinto and Latour walk to the cabin where Vaillant is staying. When they arrive, Kit Carson has beaten them to the punch, coming to tend to his friend. Fortunately, Vaillant is doing better; as soon as he can ride a horse, he will be ready to go back to Santa Fé. But though Latour keeps his promise to Jacinto, never telling anyone about the cave, he cannot stop thinking about it, often with a strange sense of horror (though the cave saved his life). Latour also becomes convinced that “neither the white men nor the Mexicans in Santa Fé understood anything about Indian beliefs or the workings of the Indian mind.”

Kit Carson knows a white trader named Zeb Orchard who is thought to be an expert in matters of indigenous religion. But when Latour asks about the rumors (the everlasting fire, the snake), Orchard makes it clear that he, too, is in the dark; all he remembers is seeing a young indigenous woman be afraid that her baby would be fed to a snake. Latour expresses his admiration for the tribes’ devotion to their customs, and Orchard agrees, noting that Catholicism will never fully erase the old traditions.