(2 of 5)
The feeling that everything I did or saw in the village was new never left me throughout my childhood. Nothing was old, not even those bedtime stories which my grandmother and my mother told me.
The ballad which affected me most was probably that of Zahran, the hero of Denshway. Denshway was only five kilometers away and the ballad dealt with a real incident. British soldiers were shooting pigeons in Denshway, the ballad goes, when a stray bullet caused a wheat silo to catch fire. Farmers gathered and a British soldier fired at them and ran away; they ran after him and in the ensuing scuffle the British soldier died. Many people were arrested. Scaffolds were erected before sentences were passed; a number of farmers were whipped, others hanged. Zahran was the hero of the battle against the British and was the first to be hanged. The ballad dwells on Zahran's courage and doggedness in the battle, how he walked with head held high to the scaffold.
I listened to the ballad night after night. My imagination roamed free: I often saw Zahran and lived his heroism in dream and reverie: I wished I were Zahran.
This was not all I came to learn in Mit Abu el Kom. I learned something that has remained with me all my life: wherever I go, wherever I happen to be, I shall always know where in fact I am. I can never lose my way because I know that I have living roots in the soil of my village.
Two places in this world make it impossible for a man to escape from himself: a battlefield and a prison cell. In Cell 54 I could only be my own companion, day and night, and it was only natural that I should come to know that "Self" of mine. I had never had such a chance before, preoccupied as I had been with work (in the army) and politics, and hurried along by the constant stream of daily life.
Now in the complete solitude of Cell 54, when I had no links at all with the outside world—not even newspapers or a wireless—the only way in which I could break my loneliness was, paradoxically, to seek the companionship of that inner entity I call "Self." It was not easy. There were areas of suffering which kept that "Self" in the dark, shadows which troubled my mind and accentuated the difficulty of self-confrontation.
Nothing is more important than self-knowledge. Once I had come to know what I wanted, and got rid of what I didn't, I was reconciled to myself and learned to live in peace. To return to my village became a lovely dream, and work in any field simply charming. The future—both foreseeable and unforeseeable—was a joy to contemplate.
When we were allowed to read books, magazines and newspapers, I voraciously read, finding in every word a novelty—something which opened new horizons before my eyes. It was thanks to an article contributed by an American psychologist to the Reader's Digest that I succeeded in getting over my troubles. The gist of that article was that a shock may occur, at any stage in a man's life, which might make him feel that all avenues in front of him are blocked, that life itself is a prison cell with a perpetually locked door.