ilarating
psychological research.

We had much and terrible pain. Our guards were brutes--your hang-dogs,
citizen. Our surroundings were vile. Our food was filthy, monotonous,
innutritious. Only men, by force of will, could live on so unbalanced a
ration. I know that our prize cattle, pigs, and sheep on the University
Demonstration Farm at Davis would have faded away and died had they
received no more scientifically balanced a ration than what we received.

We had no books to read. Our very knuckle-talk was a violation of the
rules. The world, so far as we were concerned, practically did not
exist. It was more a ghost-world. Oppenheimer, for instance, had never
seen an automobile or a motor-cycle. News did occasionally filter in--but
such dim, long-after-the-event, unreal news. Oppenheimer told me he had
not learned of the Russo-Japanese war until two years after it was over.

We were the buried alive, the living dead. Solitary was our tomb, in
which, on occasion, we talked with our knuckles like spirits rapping at a
seance.

News? Such little things were news to us. A change of bakers--we could
tell it by our bread. What made Pie-face Jones lay off a week? Was it
vacation or sickness? Why was Wilson, on the night shift for only ten
days, transferred elsewhere? Where did Smith get that black eye? We
would speculate for a week over so trivial a thing as the last.

Some convict given a month in solitary was an event. And yet we could
learn nothing from such transient and ofttimes stupid Dantes who would
remain in our inferno too short a time to learn knuckle-talk ere they
went forth again into the bright wide world of the living.

Still, again, all was not so trivial in our abode of shadows. As
example, I taught Oppenheimer to play chess. Consider how tremendous
such an achievement is--to teach a man, thirteen cells away, by means of
knuckle-raps; to teach him to visualize a chessboard, to visualize all
the pieces, pawns and positions, to know the various manners of moving;
and to teach him it all so thoroughly that he and I, by pure
visualization, were in the end able to play entire games of chess in our
minds. In the end, did I say? Another tribute to the magnificence of
Oppenheimer's mind: in the end he became my master at the game--he who
had never seen a chessman in his life.

What image of a bishop, for instance, could possibly form in his mind
when I rapped our code-sign for _bishop_?