Looking directly into a Basilisk's eyes was fatal.
However, seeing a Basilisk through a reflection in a mirror, on water, or even through a ghost would not cause death, only petrification.
If reflections in mirrors and water were all "copies" according to Muggle scientific theory, then what about a Basilisk seen through a ghost?
Pomona could not understand it. What she understood even less was why anyone would copy Cerberus.
Hagrid had found the young Fluffy in a tent set up within the Forbidden Forest. The tent's owner did not appear to have left peacefully, and the ground was covered in hoofprints.
He had hidden it and raised it for a year before someone unknown reported him. The Ministry of Magic had intended to use it to guard Gringotts' underground vaults, but an "old friend" had found a way to substitute Fluffy with a Dragon that had made a mistake.
According to what Dumbledore had found, the earliest record of copying Cerberus dated back to the fifteenth century, involving a man named Argos Pyrite. The name looked very much like an alias.
There had always been few people in the alchemy section of Hogwarts Library. After all, the subject no longer existed, and the entrance to the old alchemy classroom had been hidden behind a sculpture called Do Not Disturb the Sleeping Dragon.
Severus did not have the habit of carrying food with him. His pockets might contain dangerous things. Pomona, on the other hand, was used to carrying food. Buckbeak's attention had been drawn away the moment he saw the dead marten. Animals were like that.
The Basilisk kept crying that it was hungry. With its enormous size, how could eating rats possibly fill it? Yet even though it could have swallowed any human child, it had not attacked