HBP Chapter Twenty-Six: "The Cave"
Mar. 26th, 2014 10:34 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslock* I don’t know why, but whenever I read this chapter’s title it makes me think of My Immortal. “Harry was expecting Dumbledore to take him to the 3 bromsticks, but instead they went into………… DA CAVE!!!!!!!”
* Tom must have had some pretty awesome wizarding skills to magically get himself and two other people down the cliff at age ten. Harry, naturally, can’t do this after his sixth year at wizarding school, and has to climb down the muggle way.
* Wait, so how can you tell that a place has “known magic”? I don’t think we’ve been given any indication before that you can sense where a magical enchantment has been cast. Maybe it’s just a super special power that only Dumbledore has.
* So Harry and Dumbledore swim through the water to enter the cavern. For some reason this fact strikes me as rather Freudian.
* Dumbles works out where the concealed entrance is by running his hands along the cave walls, which again is something we’ve never seen before. What is this skill? And why isn’t it taught at Hogwarts? Maybe Dumbledore’s just been slipping curiosity-reducing potion into the Hogwarts pumpkin juice for the last x number of years, and doesn’t teach people how to recognise magic in order to reduce his chances of being found out. Naturally now that Voldemort’s come back the Headmaster needs to keep people even more docile than usual to stop them questioning his war strategy, so he’s been upping the dose over the past two years. That explains why nobody really cares about the attempted murders, and why Ron and Hermione don’t want to investigate the Draco mystery. (Harry does because his deep and enduring love for Draco is even stronger than the curiosity-killing potion.)
* “‘Harry, I’m sorry, I forgot,’ [Dumbledore] said.” Yeah, well done Professor, forgetting that your favourite pupil and the only hope of the wizarding world is catching hypothermia right next to you. What was that you said last chapter about caring for the safety of your students?
* “Once again, Lord Voldemort fails to grasp that there are much more terrible things than physical injury.” Yeah, but if you’re going to have to fight off a horde of inferi, being physically injured isn’t that good a situation to be in.
* That said, a little bit of blood wouldn’t hurt you that much, especially not since you could magically heal yourself immediately afterwards. Why not make it a really big payment, like having to kill somebody to get in? That way no good guy could ever get to your Horcrux, because they’d all be too noble (alright, alright, stop laughing) to do so.
* I’m not sure why Dumbledore thinks that trying out a spell which is bound to fail and alerts whatever’s guarding the Horcrux to your presence is “a very good idea”, but oh well.
* “‘Magic always leaves traces,’ said Dumbledore.” Not that you need to know what these traces are, Harry, or how to recognise them, even though you’ll be spending most of next year hunting for a series of hidden magical objects, and being able to tell where somebody’s cast a spell would be very helpful for that sort of thing.
* Dumbles said that weight won’t be an issue when crossing, because Voldie would care more about magical power, and bewitch the boat to only take one wizard at a time. Erm… if you say so, Dumbledore. I mean, sure, maybe he has done that; then again, maybe he hasn’t, or maybe he has, but in such a way that the boat will still capsize if it’s overloaded. You’re taking an awful risk based on a guess about a boat you just discovered thirty seconds ago, aren’t you?
* Speaking of wild guesses: “I do not think you will count, Harry: you are underage and unqualified.” Gosh, how convenient that Voldemort tied his super security system to the government’s statutes about when you can and can’t perform magic unsupervised.
* “Voldemort’s mistake, Harry, Voldemort’s mistake… age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimated youth,” says the man whom even death can’t prevent from manipulating his teenage protégé.
* The corpses floating in the lake are pretty cool, but seem suspiciously similar to the Dead Marshes from The Lord of the Rings.
* I’m not sure why wizards would view death as this great unknown mystery, when their world is full of ghosts, sentient portraits of dead people, and a stone able to summon back spirits from the afterlife.
* Yes, Voldemort, guard your precious soul-fragment with creatures which can be defeated by a basic fire-making spell! That’ll work as a security arrangement.
* So OK, Dumbles, maybe Voldemort wouldn’t want to immediately kill somebody who tried to drink the potion, but again, you’re taking a big risk based on nothing more than speculation and guesswork.
* It would kind of serve Dumbledore right if it turned out that the potion was in fact a poison which takes immediate effect, and he keeled over and died as soon as the first drop touched his lips.
* Wait, so if Voldemort would want to question anybody who gets this far, why didn’t he set up some kind of alarm system to go off when somebody tampers with the potion? He clearly doesn’t check his Horcruxes regularly, so anybody who did get this far would probably be incapacitated and die slowly anyway, in which case why not just fill the basin with poison to be on the safe side?
* Also, why does Dumbledore not try just pouring the potion on the ground, or even using the goblet to scoop out the Horcrux? Or does the Gryffindor code say that only recklessly brave ideas can be considered?
* So Harry tries to get Dumbledore some water, and accidentally ends up raising a whole lake full of zombies against them. Oops. Hey Potter, why didn’t you try conjuring water straight into Dumbledore’s mouth? Sheesh.
* Dumbledore says it’s “quite understandable” that Harry panicked and forgot to use fire. He’s right, of course, but he’s also highlighting how woefully unprepared Harry is for finding Horcruxes. You’d want to train him up almost like you train soldiers, so that when things start getting hairy he can keep his cool and take appropriate measures almost without thinking about it. Sending Harry as he is now to go after Horcruxes is like dragging somebody from high school, putting a gun in their hands and drafting them into a special ops unit without any basic training.
* “‘I am not worried, Harry,’ said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. ‘I am with you.’” Even though Harry just panicked in the face of an Inferi attack and Dumbledore had to save the day. What a toady that man is.
* Tom must have had some pretty awesome wizarding skills to magically get himself and two other people down the cliff at age ten. Harry, naturally, can’t do this after his sixth year at wizarding school, and has to climb down the muggle way.
* Wait, so how can you tell that a place has “known magic”? I don’t think we’ve been given any indication before that you can sense where a magical enchantment has been cast. Maybe it’s just a super special power that only Dumbledore has.
* So Harry and Dumbledore swim through the water to enter the cavern. For some reason this fact strikes me as rather Freudian.
* Dumbles works out where the concealed entrance is by running his hands along the cave walls, which again is something we’ve never seen before. What is this skill? And why isn’t it taught at Hogwarts? Maybe Dumbledore’s just been slipping curiosity-reducing potion into the Hogwarts pumpkin juice for the last x number of years, and doesn’t teach people how to recognise magic in order to reduce his chances of being found out. Naturally now that Voldemort’s come back the Headmaster needs to keep people even more docile than usual to stop them questioning his war strategy, so he’s been upping the dose over the past two years. That explains why nobody really cares about the attempted murders, and why Ron and Hermione don’t want to investigate the Draco mystery. (Harry does because his deep and enduring love for Draco is even stronger than the curiosity-killing potion.)
* “‘Harry, I’m sorry, I forgot,’ [Dumbledore] said.” Yeah, well done Professor, forgetting that your favourite pupil and the only hope of the wizarding world is catching hypothermia right next to you. What was that you said last chapter about caring for the safety of your students?
* “Once again, Lord Voldemort fails to grasp that there are much more terrible things than physical injury.” Yeah, but if you’re going to have to fight off a horde of inferi, being physically injured isn’t that good a situation to be in.
* That said, a little bit of blood wouldn’t hurt you that much, especially not since you could magically heal yourself immediately afterwards. Why not make it a really big payment, like having to kill somebody to get in? That way no good guy could ever get to your Horcrux, because they’d all be too noble (alright, alright, stop laughing) to do so.
* I’m not sure why Dumbledore thinks that trying out a spell which is bound to fail and alerts whatever’s guarding the Horcrux to your presence is “a very good idea”, but oh well.
* “‘Magic always leaves traces,’ said Dumbledore.” Not that you need to know what these traces are, Harry, or how to recognise them, even though you’ll be spending most of next year hunting for a series of hidden magical objects, and being able to tell where somebody’s cast a spell would be very helpful for that sort of thing.
* Dumbles said that weight won’t be an issue when crossing, because Voldie would care more about magical power, and bewitch the boat to only take one wizard at a time. Erm… if you say so, Dumbledore. I mean, sure, maybe he has done that; then again, maybe he hasn’t, or maybe he has, but in such a way that the boat will still capsize if it’s overloaded. You’re taking an awful risk based on a guess about a boat you just discovered thirty seconds ago, aren’t you?
* Speaking of wild guesses: “I do not think you will count, Harry: you are underage and unqualified.” Gosh, how convenient that Voldemort tied his super security system to the government’s statutes about when you can and can’t perform magic unsupervised.
* “Voldemort’s mistake, Harry, Voldemort’s mistake… age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimated youth,” says the man whom even death can’t prevent from manipulating his teenage protégé.
* The corpses floating in the lake are pretty cool, but seem suspiciously similar to the Dead Marshes from The Lord of the Rings.
* I’m not sure why wizards would view death as this great unknown mystery, when their world is full of ghosts, sentient portraits of dead people, and a stone able to summon back spirits from the afterlife.
* Yes, Voldemort, guard your precious soul-fragment with creatures which can be defeated by a basic fire-making spell! That’ll work as a security arrangement.
* So OK, Dumbles, maybe Voldemort wouldn’t want to immediately kill somebody who tried to drink the potion, but again, you’re taking a big risk based on nothing more than speculation and guesswork.
* It would kind of serve Dumbledore right if it turned out that the potion was in fact a poison which takes immediate effect, and he keeled over and died as soon as the first drop touched his lips.
* Wait, so if Voldemort would want to question anybody who gets this far, why didn’t he set up some kind of alarm system to go off when somebody tampers with the potion? He clearly doesn’t check his Horcruxes regularly, so anybody who did get this far would probably be incapacitated and die slowly anyway, in which case why not just fill the basin with poison to be on the safe side?
* Also, why does Dumbledore not try just pouring the potion on the ground, or even using the goblet to scoop out the Horcrux? Or does the Gryffindor code say that only recklessly brave ideas can be considered?
* So Harry tries to get Dumbledore some water, and accidentally ends up raising a whole lake full of zombies against them. Oops. Hey Potter, why didn’t you try conjuring water straight into Dumbledore’s mouth? Sheesh.
* Dumbledore says it’s “quite understandable” that Harry panicked and forgot to use fire. He’s right, of course, but he’s also highlighting how woefully unprepared Harry is for finding Horcruxes. You’d want to train him up almost like you train soldiers, so that when things start getting hairy he can keep his cool and take appropriate measures almost without thinking about it. Sending Harry as he is now to go after Horcruxes is like dragging somebody from high school, putting a gun in their hands and drafting them into a special ops unit without any basic training.
* “‘I am not worried, Harry,’ said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. ‘I am with you.’” Even though Harry just panicked in the face of an Inferi attack and Dumbledore had to save the day. What a toady that man is.
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no subject
Date: 2014-04-04 01:59 am (UTC)It was that he never put two and two together about the room that frustrated me. After thinking so hard about what he might need to think to get into the room, and then himself thinking 'I need to hide something.' Hiding it, with the hopes of being able to find it again, and then never thinking...Draco is hiding something....I wonder if....(though it has been a long time since I read this, maybe he did at some point think that and just didn't have time?)
Though he would have got plenty of clues if he entered it with Draco in there working on the cabinet, which is what he was trying to do for a long time, and would have been able to do if he thought the right thing.
The way I saw it was that Draco found the RoHT during his fifth year when the DA was hiding in that room. It makes perfect sense for him to think "I need to hide something" in order to get into a room where he knows people are hiding. Then that summer after he was given his task he looked into what the cabinet did as he knew there already was one in Hogwarts. It would be pointless to try and smuggle one in, especially since it was "lost".
Draco had to have known that cabinet was there for the plot to make sense at all. He had no reason to be thinking I need a vanishing cabinet during his fifth year. So if that was how the room worked, Draco wouldn't have seen it his fifth year to seek it out over the summer. And saying that he did find the RoHT during his fifth year, he wouldn't have then changed what he thought to I need to work on fixing the vanishing cabinet, because that wasn't what he thought to get into the room in the first place.
The only way your theory (that Draco never found the RoHT) works is if he figured out that the room gave you what you want, and he asked for arbitrary things that the room just happened to always have laying around in it. That is the only way he would think that this room would give him something he had not previously seen in it. (or he randomly picked a vanishing cabinet as one of the things he asked for, and therefore would have seen it in the room to seek it out later.)
But it simply makes more sense that when he was trying to find out where the DA was hiding, that he thought he needed to hide something and found the RoHT. It's probably one of the more common rooms found...hence all the junk hidden there.
Plus, as others have said, we know that a Professor was in the room with Draco at the same time.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-04 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-04 04:42 am (UTC)Though, it would be a lot easier for Draco to move the cabinet if it was already in Hogwarts.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-04 06:01 am (UTC)The two cabinets are first mentioned in COS: When Harry ends up at B&B he hides in a cabinet when he hears the Malfoys talking. Later Peeves breaks the Hogwarts cabinet, which is located on the 1st floor, at the request of Nearly-Headless-Nick, in order to create a distraction for Harry.
In OOTP Montague tries to take points off the twins and they stuff him into the cabinet. A day or two later he re-emerges in a toilet and appears to be brain-damaged until much later in the year. But according to what Draco says on the Tower, Montague had told him (possibly on the train, on the way home) that from within the cabinet he could sometimes hear sounds from the Hogwarts corridor and sometimes from B&B. So Draco realized there were two connected cabinets, which he could use to circumvent the Hogwarts security. All he needed to do was to stabilize the connection. Draco tried to get Borgin to tell him how to do it, Borgin claimed he couldn't without seeing the other cabinet, Draco threatened Borgin with Fenrir (and possibly his Dark Mark). We don't know if later Borgin provided any information, but starting from early in the school year Draco had been skipping homework and avoiding Quidditch. I'm guessing that either the house-elves put the cabinet in the ROHT because it was faulty and dangerous or Draco put it there so he could work in quiet.