No matter how much destruction Voldemort had brought to the Wizarding World, or how vile his character had been, at least one thing was certain: he had been exceptionally handsome.
Pomona lay sprawled on the bed, reading a book about the soul written by an ancient Arab scholar, a Christmas gift from Albus, while chewing on a Sugar Quill from Honeydukes—also a Christmas gift.
She had deliberately turned to the page Albus had marked: "Through relations, the soul exists in all sentient and insentient bodies."
The French translation rendered "insentient" as perception and sensation. The sentence was followed by an Arab tale: "Said cannot fail to know what is in Amir's soul, for that which relates to many things may be differentiated through its relations."
Animism held that all things possessed souls; a tree or a stone was like a person. A diary, for instance, did not possess perception, while a person did.
Yet the example given in the book was of a young father and his son. "Father" referred to his relationship with his sons, while "young" referred to his own nature, the core of all relationships. Reading it in context, she felt there was something wrong with the translation.
Animism had appeared in seventeenth-century France and Italy. How could Arabs living in the tenth century have known of it?
"Damn Frenchmen!" she muttered. What kind of bloody translation was this?
Yet even if she had the original text, she would not have been able to read it, because she did not know Arabic. Even if she used a Time-Turner to travel back a thousand years and ask the author in person, she would not understand him—unless, like Hermione, she took a translator back with her.
Before Hermione, no time traveler had ever taken a companion into the past.