The description of the New Mexico landscape is a metaphor for the religious development of the people who live there. Cather writes that the
mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into landscape."
The same could be said of the Indians and Mexicans of the territory from the nineteenth-century viewpoint of a Catholic missionary. They are ancient people, consisting of the materials for fully developed human beings, but lack the unifying, completing principal of Christian spirituality. God has provided the materials in New Mexico for Latour to complete. This is underscored when Latour perceives the Indians at Acoma as antediluvian creatures, ancient rock-turtles.
