Harry Potter 06 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Harry.
    ‘You look worried.’
    Harry had indeed been eyeing the Pensieve with some apprehension. His previous experiences with the odd device that stored and revealed thoughts and memories, though highly instructive, had also been uncomfortable. The last time he had disturbed its contents, he had seen much more than he would have wished. But Dumbledore was smiling.
    ‘This time, you enter the Pensieve with me … and, even more unusually, with permission.’
    ‘Where are we going, sir?’
    ‘For a trip down Bob Ogden’s memory lane,’ said Dumbledore, pulling from his pocket a crystal bottle containing a swirling silvery-white substance.
    ‘Who was Bob Ogden?’
    ‘He was employed by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement,’ said Dumbledore. ‘He died some time ago, but not before I had tracked him down and persuaded him to confide these recollections to me. We are about to accompany him on a visit he made in the course of his duties. If you will stand, Harry …’
    But Dumbledore was having difficulty pulling out the stopper of the crystal bottle: his injured hand seemed stiff and painful.
    ‘Shall – shall I, sir?’
    ‘No matter, Harry –’
    Dumbledore pointed his wand at the bottle and the cork flew out.
    ‘Sir – how did you injure your hand?’ Harry asked again, looking at the blackened fingers with a mixture of revulsion and pity.
    ‘Now is not the moment for that story, Harry. Not yet. We have an appointment with Bob Ogden.’
    Dumbledore tipped the silvery contents of the bottle into the Pensieve, where they swirled and shimmered, neither liquid nor gas.
    ‘After you,’ said Dumbledore, gesturing towards the bowl.
    Harry bent forwards, took a deep breath, and plunged his face into the silvery substance. He felt his feet leave the office floor; he was falling, falling, through whirling darkness and then, quite suddenly, he was blinking in dazzling sunlight. Before his eyes had adjusted, Dumbledore landed beside him.
    They were standing in a country lane bordered by high, tangled hedgerows, beneath a summer sky as bright and blue as a forget-me-not. Some ten feet in front of them stood a short, plump man wearing enormously thick glasses that reduced his eyes to molelike specks. He was reading a wooden signpost that was sticking out of the brambles on the left-hand side of the road. Harry knew this must be Ogden; he was the only person in sight, and he was also wearing the strange assortment of clothes so often chosen by inexperienced wizards trying to look like Muggles: in this case, a frock-coat and spats over a striped one-piece bathing costume. Before Harry had time to do more than register his bizarre appearance, however, Ogden had set off at a brisk walk down the lane.
    Dumbledore and Harry followed. As they passed the wooden sign, Harry looked up at its two arms. The one pointing back the way they had come read: ‘Great Hangleton, 5 miles’. The arm pointing after Ogden said: ‘Little Hangleton, 1 mile’.
    They walked a short way with nothing to see but the hedgerows, the wide blue sky overhead and the swishing, frock-coated figure ahead, then the lane curved to the left and fell away, sloping steeply down a hillside, so that they had a sudden, unexpected view of a whole valley laid out in front of them. Harry could see a village, undoubtedly Little Hangleton, nestled between two steep hills, its church and graveyard clearly visible. Across the valley, set on the opposite hillside, was a handsome manor house surrounded by a wide expanse of velvety green lawn.
    Ogden had broken into a reluctant trot due to the steep downward slope. Dumbledore lengthened his stride and Harry hurried to keep up. He thought Little Hangleton must be their final destination and wondered, as he had done on the night they had found Slughorn, why they had to approach it from such a distance. He soon discovered that he was mistaken in thinking that they were going to the village, however. The lane curved to the right, and when they rounded the corner, it was to see the very edge of Ogden’s frock-coat vanishing through a gap in the hedge.
    Dumbledore and Harry followed him on to a narrow dirt track bordered by higher and wilder hedgerows than those they had left behind. The path was crooked, rocky and potholed, sloping downhill like the last one, and it seemed to be heading for a patch of dark trees a little below them. Sure enough, the track soon opened up at the copse, and Dumbledore and Harry came