The room was full of silent people sitting at a long and ornate table. The room's usual furniture had been pushed carelessly up against the walls. Illumination came from a roaring fire beneath a handsome marble mantelpiece surmounted by a gilded mirror. Snape and Yaxley lingered for a moment on the threshold and, as their eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light, they were drawn upward to the strangest feature of the scene: an apparently unconscious human figure hanging upside down over the table, revolving slowly as if suspended by an invisible rope and reflected in both the mirror and the bare, polished surface of the table below. None of the people seated underneath this singular sight were looking at it, though Hermione glanced at it in fascination occasionally.