Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J. K. Rowling [266]
The silvery stuff within began to swirl very fast. Harry leaned forward over it and saw that it had become transparent. He was, once again, looking down into a room as though through a circular window in the ceiling. … In fact, unless he was much mistaken, he was looking down upon the Great Hall. …
His breath was actually fogging the surface of Snape’s thoughts. … His brain seemed to be in limbo. … It would be insane to do the thing that he was so strongly tempted to do. … He was trembling. … Snape could be back at any moment … but Harry thought of Cho’s anger, of Malfoy’s jeering face, and a reckless daring seized him.
He took a great gulp of breath and plunged his face into the surface of Snape’s thoughts. At once, the floor of the office lurched, tipping Harry headfirst into the Pensieve. …
He was falling through cold blackness, spinning furiously as he went, and then —
He was standing in the middle of the Great Hall, but the four House tables were gone. Instead there were more than a hundred smaller tables, all facing the same way, at each of which sat a student, head bent low, scribbling on a roll of parchment. The only sound was the scratching of quills and the occasional rustle as somebody adjusted their parchment. It was clearly exam time.
Sunshine was streaming through the high windows onto the bent heads, which shone chestnut and copper and gold in the bright light. Harry looked around carefully. Snape had to be here somewhere. … This was his memory. …
And there he was, at a table right behind Harry. Harry stared. Snape-the-teenager had a stringy, pallid look about him, like a plant kept in the dark. His hair was lank and greasy and was flopping onto the table, his hooked nose barely half an inch from the surface of the parchment as he scribbled. Harry moved around behind Snape and read the heading of the examination paper:
DEFENSE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS —
ORDINARY WIZARDING LEVEL
So Snape had to be fifteen or sixteen, around Harry’s own age. His hand was flying across the parchment; he had written at least a foot more than his closest neighbors, and yet his writing was minuscule and cramped.
“Five more minutes!”
The voice made Harry jump; turning, he saw the top of Professor Flitwick’s head moving between the desks a short distance away. Professor Flitwick was walking past a boy with untidy black hair … very untidy black hair. …
Harry moved so quickly that, had he been solid, he would have knocked desks flying. Instead he seemed to slide, dreamlike, across two aisles and up a third. The back of the black-haired boy’s head drew nearer and nearer. … He was straightening up now, putting down his quill, pulling his roll of parchment toward him so as to reread what he had written. …
Harry stopped in front of the desk and gazed down at his fifteen-year-old father.
Excitement exploded in the pit of his stomach: It was as though he was looking at himself but with deliberate mistakes. James’s eyes were hazel, his nose was slightly longer than Harry’s, and there was no scar on his forehead, but they had the same thin face, same mouth, same eyebrows. James’s hair stuck up at the back exactly as Harry’s did, his hands could have been Harry’s, and Harry could tell that when James stood up, they would be within an inch of each other’s heights.
James yawned hugely and rumpled up his hair, making it even messier than it had been. Then, with a glance toward Professor Flitwick, he turned in his seat and grinned at a boy sitting four seats behind him.
With another shock of excitement, Harry saw Sirius give James the thumbs-up. Sirius was lounging in his chair at his ease, tilting it back on two legs. He was very good-looking; his dark hair fell into his eyes with a sort of casual elegance neither James’s nor Harry’s could ever have achieved, and a girl sitting behind him was eyeing him hopefully, though he didn’t seem to have noticed. And two seats along from this girl — Harry’s stomach gave another pleasurable squirm — was Remus Lupin. He looked rather pale and peaky (was the full moon approaching?)