174 
CREATURES OF MYSTERY 
dulum.” Yet, examination of torture cells uncovered in Bar¬ 
celona after General Franco’s victory during the recent civil 
war in Spain proved that these refinements of torture existed 
in actual fact. 
These communist torturers, with diabolical ingenuity, dis¬ 
carded mere physical methods of inflicting pain, and laid siege 
to the brain itself through the use of glaring lights of various 
colors, painted spirals, and other fantastic designs upon the 
cell walls, producing images on the retina that gradually burned 
themselves into the brain and finally led to madness. Thus 
does the rattlesnake’s gaily decorated skin exert its baleful 
influence upon its victim, to supplement the effect of the stony, 
basilisk eyes and the sound of the gently whirring rattles. 
Talbot Mundy, in his book, “The Devil’s Guard,” tells how 
some fiendish Tibetan bandits subjected a traveler to mental 
agony by torturing his friend before his eyes. Thus the cruel 
and perverted mind of man invents punishments that might 
well originate in the mind of a demon. The painted cells of 
Barcelona, in their effect upon the prisoner, outmoded and sur¬ 
passed the torture of the Middle Ages. They were based upon 
certain well-known optical illusions, supplemented with the 
manipulation of light and color, as drawn from scientific ex¬ 
periments on vision and the perception of images by the brain. 
The cells were built and the walls painted by Alfonso Lau¬ 
rent Cik, a Yugoslavian architect and painter. After their 
fiendish purpose was disclosed at the end of the civil war, he 
was arrested and tried before a military court, when their 
whole story was revealed and given to the world. Cik testified 
that he had acted upon compulsion and had merely carried out 
the orders of the Russian secret police, the dread Ogpu. Evi¬ 
dence pointed to the fact that the cells constructed and deco¬ 
rated by Cik were copied from plans already in possession of 
the Russian terrorist organization, evolved by brilliant but 
perverted minds through research in the domains of psychol¬ 
ogy and physiology. Nothing more fantastic and horrible can 
be found in Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein” or Bram Stoker’s 
“Dracula” than this scheme for destroying the intellect through 
insidious attacks upon the sense of sight—a form of torture 
