– Just think – said my friend – now we shall get off this cart, find the spring, and all at once be free of all our fears. A few people are wait­ing there, it is true, dither­ing at the bend where the hill­side already hides behind the foliage of the trees, and they would like to climb onto the cart. True, this is the bend where, if you get off, there is no more fear, but you see, there will always be someone get­ting on. And do not think they don't know that this is the bend… they know it well, but man is like that, hug­ging a tree tight while he cries out: let me go, let me go!

I kept silent, not want­ing to be the one who clings and cries out, but I was a little wary. My heart was not light. True, daunt­less­ness was far from me, I would by no means call myself dar­ing, and cour­age is not my daily bread either. Dare I step out bey­ond the well-known bounds of my life? My fears did choke me at times, but since I knew them by now, they also meant secur­ity. Yes, I clung to them all the same.

– Well, God bless you! – said my friend to the driver, who nod­ded without a word and did not even turn towards us as we clambered down. – Come, the spring is a little fur­ther on, let us go! – and he quickened his pace until I could barely keep up. And he talked:

– If you get off here, you can be free of all your old friends, the fears that have haunted you so long, that turn up again and again and, wheth­er you like it or not, dog your foot­steps. How often you have believed you had escaped them, only to find at the next step that you had not shaken them off after all. The very thing you most wanted to be free of is the one that dogs your foot­steps, impossible to shake off.

– Yes, sadly I have felt that more than once – I said quietly, under the weight of the truth.

– But you noticed that whichever fear you no longer dreaded evap­or­ated unnoticed! – my friend was enthu­si­ast­ic, and I rather list­less. His explan­a­tion did not carry me away, and I fell to mus­ing, won­der­ing wheth­er I might be afraid of los­ing my fears?

– And yet that is how this game goes – some step out of it, oth­ers are join­ing it just now. They scarcely notice what they are hir­ing them­selves out to – and he talked on with enthu­si­asm. His voice smoothed into a mur­mur and became a mere accom­pani­ment to the beat of our walk­ing, right, left, for­ward, again… My thoughts were some­where else entirely, as if they had fallen behind my body on its way to the spring.

‘Ter­ror… when it creeps down my back like a cold touch, and that pres­sure in my chest that makes my very breath catch. The body shows its emer­gency responses: dilated pupils, raised blood pres­sure, a rising pulse rate and the sweat, that ter­rible cold sweat. And all this not so that I can bet­ter see the escape route, or be able to leap, but only so that through the wider slit of my eyes the ter­ror can pierce me more fully still, so that instead of leap­ing, my feet take root in the ground for good. So that my quick­en­ing pulse may quiver in time with the throb­bing of fear, so that my gasp­ing breath may draw in its cold and bit­ter stench…’

– Are you listen­ing at all? Take that stick, it will serve you well on the climb! – this time it was an instruc­tion on my friend's part, and it roused me a little, but only a little, from my mus­ing.

– Of course, the ter­ror! – I said, answer­ing myself rather than him…

‘Fear needs ever new ser­vants. If one of the old ones tries to escape, it reaches out after him. If someone tries to prosper, it tight­ens the choke chain on him. It will not let the old ones go, and it gath­ers new ones, pos­it­ively recruits them. Fear sealed a blood pact with me when it wounded me, and through the wound it sucks my blood and slowly con­sumes me, and so its essence enters me in turn and soaks me through. It has seized the essence of my life, and fear itself has become a part of me. Every beat of my heart drives its infec­tious pois­on all through my veins. I am soaked through with the bit­ter pois­on of fear… fear is a blight upon the soul…’

– Come, here is the water of the spring, drink! And that is the end of fears! There is no anxi­ety, only the joy of the soul… – and he talked and talked, slowly dis­solv­ing the ter­ror with­in.