Potion In The Cave Maybe Revealed - Try This For Yourself

[rebecca]

I posted this to TOL, and thought you folks who don't see everything there 
might appreciate it too.

One poster posed that there is a clue in that DD's portrait in the 
headmaster's office after his demise appeared to be sleeping.  I kept 
thinking green light, green light...it's mentioned all over that chapter in 
HBP. There's all kinds of speculation about the potion that  makes one think 
Draught of  Living Death or Sleeping Potion, doesn't it? What's intriguing 
about this is we're told that the DoLD is pink, and pale pink, at its last 
stages and the Sleeping Potion is purple, so that would lead you to think 
neither of those is correct.  But consider these statements from HBP:

(Slughorn's first exercise in Potions, DoLD at the last stage) "Harry 
stirred counterclockwise, held his breath, and stirred once clockwise. The 
effect was immediate. The potion turned pale pink."

And let's not forget this in the same chapter: "Harry glanced around. As far 
as he could see, no one else's potion had turned as pale as his."

Then there's Harry and Dumbledore in the cave later in the book: "Sure 
enough, the greenish light seemed to be growing larger at last, and within 
minutes, the boat had come to a halt, bumping gently into something that 
Harry could not see at first."

"The basin was full of an emerald liquid emitting that phosphorescent glow"

"Was this why he had been invited along - so that he could force-feed 
Dumbledore a potion that might cause him unendurable pain?"

Now, let's recall that the "DoLD seems to be pale pink when completed" 
thingy I mentioned prior. I'm a certified scuba instructor with some 500 or 
so dives under my dive belt - I know what fish and coral look like 
underwater on cloudy day 30 ft underwater and red is a color you don't see 
naturally unless you have bright sunlight and very clear water or add 
filters or additional bright light -without much light, red fades and looks 
like a bright variant of the subdued light around it, for lack of a better 
description.   Pink is a color made by mixing red and white, and in pale 
pink, more white than red.  Remember, red is the one of the lowest 
frequencies of light discernable by the human eye and white by its nature 
reflects light. If there is a greenish light above the potion, one could 
submit it is actually absorbing what it can and then reflecting back what it 
cannot absorb based on the natural color of the potion in ambient or white 
light.  The phosphorescent glow could be the reflection of the white color 
portion of the potion - the pink creates an eyeball impression of a brighter 
green.

You can actually duplicate this and see the emerald color describing the 
potion in the cave by using 2 appropriately colored boxes in any paint 
program (even Powerpoint using colored text boxes, which I used first to 
try.) I used 1 box as pale pink as the base, full color, and the other box 
slightly bigger at about a 20% transparency to duplicate low light, since we 
know the cave was very dark as Harry couldn't even tell what the rowboat 
bumped into when it came to rest on the island where the potion and light 
were.  I will mention that whatever transparency you use, you'll see that 
the color remains a heightened green where the pale pink box resides with 
the green overlay.

Just so you know, the purple experiment of this (for the Sleeping Potion as 
its described) revealed a *darker* shade of green, since deep blue and red 
make up that color. The purple hasn't any white in the mix, so the 
phosphorescent glow or reflection of light wouldn't occur.

Tricky, tricky that JKR, hm?  IMO, DD drank some souped up Draught of Living 
Death.

Rebecca