9. Even when there was nothing around to frighten them, they were scared by the simple sounds of animals’ movements and hissing serpents.
10. Trembling, they were dying with fright, shutting their eyes even against the empty air, as if they could thus avoid what was scaring them.
11. Wickedness is cowardly, condemned by its own witness. Distressed by conscience, the wicked person thinks everything is worse than it is.
12. Fear betrays our ability to help ourselves by thinking clearly.
13. Expecting the worst, people prefer to remain ignorant of the cause of their torment.
14. The night itself was powerless, rising up from the darkest corners of a hell that didn’t really exist. As they slept the same sleep,
15. monsters from their own imaginations rose up and hunted them down. They were paralyzed with fear as their spirits failed them. A sudden and unexpected fear drenched their whole being.
16. All who fell into that kind of place became like prisoners, locked up in cells without metal bars.
17. Whether they were farmers or shepherds or laborers toiling alone in the desert, the same fate overtook them all, and they were all bound in the darkness as by a single chain.
18. Whether it was the whispering of the wind, or the sound of birds singing in the thick branches of trees, or the rhythm of rushing water,
19. or the crashing down of rocks from a high cliff, or the unseen scurrying of little animals, or the howling of the most frightening of beasts, or an echo from the valleys between the hills; whatever it was, it frightened them so much that they were completely paralyzed.
20. So while bright sunlight lit up the rest of the world, and people and things went about their ordered, active lives,