A Cristero priest, a hired killer, three miserable peasant couples, a dying girl, and the inhospitable land and ill-fated history of Mexico: in his second novel, Revueltas traces an extreme situation where passions intersect until the barren lands are flooded, burying the betrayed sons of the Revolution and the Cristeros abandoned by God and the Church.

Each of them stubbornly pursues their destiny, and Revueltas condenses in them, with ferocious mastery, his vision of desperate Mexican violence, which here mourns all human ties.