LONDON, Sept 3 (AFP) - Best-selling children's author J. K. Rowling has given fans of her Harry Potter books a brief but tantalising taster of the next title in the series chronicling the boy wizard's adventures, a report said Friday.
Visitors to her website, www.jkrowling.com, were able to play an online game of darts, which, if accomplished successfully, revealed a picture of a safe on the page, the Sun newspaper said in its Saturday edition.
Those able to crack the safe's code were able to see two sentences from the as-yet unreleased sixth book in the series, "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince".
Rowling's website has proved astonishingly successful among Harry Potter fans eager for information about her creation between books.
In July it was reported that in the eight weeks the site had been up and running at the time, it had received an astonishing 220 million visits.
The extract from the latest book is unlikely to reveal any secrets to even the most ardent Potter-philes, reading, according to the Sun:
"He looked rather like an old lion.
"There were streaks of grey in his tawny hair and his bushy eyebrows; he had keen yellowish eyes behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and a certain rangy, loping grace even though he walked with a slight limp."
The next book will be the second-last in the planned series of seven, which have already spawned three hugely successful spin-off films.