On a remote Haitian island, Father Jesus, a Christian priest, takes his donkey up the mountain Morne Vidé. It has been a dry and unfavorable season, so he is headed for la Misère, a farming village at the peak of the mountain. Father Jesus thinks of Perrault, the local voodoo priest, and meditates on the village’s dual faith to Christian and Vodun religion.  Father Jesus wakes in the middle of night to the sound of heavy rains and thunder. Perrault is outside and praying to both Christian and Vodun gods to stop the rains and save the crops. A village meeting is called the next day, and one of the villagers runs in with an unconscious white man and his medical bag, which identifies him as Doctor Jean Pierre Gide. When he wakes up, he is taken under the care of Father Jesus, but Perrault is cautious of the strange man who washed up from the sea, believing he may be a bad omen of sorts. Gide criticizes the villagers who laze around during the day due to the fields being dried up. One night, Gide awakens to the villagers chanting in Creole, and he is inexplicably drawn to the sounds. He follows the chanting up the mountain and interrupts a ritual of villagers surrounding a girl dressed in white. He grasps the girl by the wrist to make sure she is real, and suddenly a boar charges in and injures her. He stops the bleeding and saves her life, and the villagers closely watch him with expressionless faces. In the crowd, he sees a sickly old woman who reminds him of a girl who came to him for treatment on the mainland. The girl was biracial and his son’s secret lover. She came to Gide to ask for an abortion, and he reluctantly complied with a guilty conscience. Gide goes missing after the ritual, and things start to look up for the village as disease dwindles and the natives all cooperate to make a successful harvest. As they tend to the fields, Father Jesus hears the farmers singing in call-and-response with the simidor, the song leader. He realizes that his work in the mountain is done and heads down the mountain. He informs the police about the missing doctor, and they don’t believe a white man can survive on the mountain alone. On a boat ride back to the mainland, Father Jesus hears a strange worker loudly singing a religious song.