This place—the Nikolaikirche—lacked the dark, spooky look of so many churches. The vault was a semicircular barrel supported by fluted columns—but not of the Doric, Ionian, Corinthian, or any other known order of architecture. For the capitals were made to resemble sheaves of slender vertical palm leaves. The high vaults above, sluiced with clear white light rushing in through high windows, gathered themselves together and plunged down into these rich bundles of light green leaves, from which clusters of fruit peeked out. The altar rail described a broad half-circle with a gap in the center, like a pair of arms sweeping out to embrace the congregants. The font was a gilded goblet. Behind it, steps led up to an altar, above which a quicksilver Jesus hung from a plank. This part of the church—the Altarraum—was a sanctum of polished wine-colored and fleece-gray marble with many windows, giving a view of budding linden trees startled by pockets of breeze speeding invisibly through a blue heaven. The patterns in the marble suggested powerful turbulent motion—rapids, say, or lightning streaking through boiling clouds—arrested and silenced. Recalling the notion that if you knew the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at one moment of time, you’d know all—you’d be God. At the back of the church was a balcony claimed by a great organ of silver pipes in a white case in Roman style, lilies and palm leaves rampant. Hunched doggedly at the console was a man in a great periwig and a coat brocaded with hundreds of wee flowers. An elderly man in academician’s robes loitered nearby, gazing down curiously at Eliza, Caroline, and other members of the entourage who were now straggling up the aisle; for Adelaide had been woken out of a nap by the stoppage of her coach, and had pursued her mother, and been pursued in turn by nurses, and by Eliza’s guards, who were under orders not to let Adelaide out of their sight so long as they were on the hostile ground of Leipzig. The organist noticed all this, and raised his hands from the manuals, and the throaty singing of the organ-pipes seeped away, leaving in the still air of the church only the faint hiss of some leakage in the valves, and panting of a couple of pudgy schoolboys who’d been dragooned into pumping the bellows. Eliza applauded, and after a moment Caroline, recognizing the organist, followed suit.