Peter and Paul Cathedral

This guide to Peter and Paul Cathedral opens in October 1830, when lightning strikes the spire's gilded angel and bends it more than a hundred feet above the fortress walls, with no money in the treasury for scaffolding. It follows Pyotr Telushkin, a roofer from Yaroslavl, as he studies the bare copper cone and works out a way up using nothing but a loop of rope, with no harness and no net. Crowds gather below, certain they are about to watch a man fall.