Editing Hassan (section)

===Crazy Hassan and the Monk of Ibul Hasheem===

I am a monk of the ascetic order of Ibul Hasheem.

During my tenth winter as a brother of spirit sand, I was sent into the desert to under go my soul shaping. For many days I endured the hardships of the shifting sands, the burning heat that baked the water and salt from my body, the freezing nights that bit through my hessian robe.

I sought to unite my heat with that of the desert itself, to embrace and in turn be embraced by the golden sands. However something held me back, a dark shadow that lurked on the surface of my soul, an abyss into the self that in my weakness I could not enter into.

I fully understood, the desert abhors weakness. So long as I could not confront this inner journey my fate in the desert was sealed.

Upon my third new moon, having supped on a meager meal of hardy sand scrubs, a vision came to me. Perhaps in my water deprived delirium my consciousness bordered the spirit world, perhaps the spirit world sought me out to begin with. To this day I cannot say.

The apparition took the form of a man, a great and terrible man more fearsome than any demon depicted in the Talmud. He towered over me though his stature was crooked, where the winds whipped at my humble robe a calm seem to center around this giant. A single brow knitted from coarse black wires framed a sun stained face, wrapped in sand logged fabrics of mismatched material and design much of his person was hidden from me.

Save, that is, for his cardamon yellow grin and great black rimmed eyes, alive with fire and madness. My mind was called back in an instant to the studies of my youth, of the text that named Bagda-yashir. The patron saint of the mad and the lost who reputedly acted as guardian of the desert's waters and final judge of it's many trials, for who but the mad and the lost would subject themselves to naked sands?

From deep within the monumental pile of rags a voice boomed forth like the thunder of the glass storms that herald the greatest of sandstorms.

"WELCOME TO CRAZY HASSAN'S BETTER-THAN NEW USED CAMELS. I AM CRAZY HASSAN AND THESE..."

The giant gestured behind him.

"ARE HIS CAMELS."

His words shook me to the very core.

I croaked through sand choked lips but no voice would come when bidden, through wheezing breath my tongue slapped slackly but could not form the words of my dying prayer. For I knew in this moment, I would not return from this place.

"CRAZY HASSAN HAS THE CAMEL FOR YOU TODAY, INDEED HE HAS CAMEL FOR EVERYONE EVERYDAY!"
He added as an after thought, with his ever present booming enthusiasm.
"COME, LET ME WALK YOU AND TALK YOU. MAYBE LAST TIME YOU LEGS SEE THE SAND WHEN WE FINISH, EH?"

A hand like a slab of granite crashed into my back knocking my scant breath from me as this titan laughed a horrendous cackle. Enveloping me in one mighty arm I was dragged, feet limply marking the sand behind me, along with him past a herd of hardy camels.

I cannot recount my experiences from here on in accurate detail, a number of times I must've passed out though I could not recall ever closing my eyes. What I do remember, what is burned upon my soul to this day, is how Hassan.... Crazy Hassan... would bring me from camel to identical camel for inspection.

"POLAR CAMEL, BRISK TRADE IN THIS MODEL. RUGGED FEATURES PERFECT FOR ARCTIC CONDITIONS. BUT THIS IS NO CAMEL FOR YOU."

A new camel would rise in my vision, same as the last.

"AQUATIC CAMEL, POPULAR IN THE TURNWISE SEA FOR ITS SUBMARINE GRACE. FEATURES BUILT IN FLOTATION DEVICE. BUT THIS IS NO CAMEL OF YOURS."

Camels again and again, the jungle camel and the temperate forest camel, the all terrain camel and the urban camel (very environmentally friendly!). I could have sworn the man merely led me in a circle only to return me to the same camel over and over claiming a new set of remarkable abilities each time. By straining my throat, clogged with spittle and sand, I told him as much.

No matter how sure I was of my doom before that point, as soon as I uttered those words I was certain of my death as I was that the sun would rise. A deadly calm over took the desert, the wind shrank in fear of the great man snaring me in his arm of rags, the grains of sand under my feet felt as if they had been frozen to stone in awe of this great soul.

My life, my eternity was lost in that moment. Locked in the great black rimmed eyes that seem to bore into my very soul, I desperately wanted to writhe and shrink before him so as to hide my wretchedness but I was held in place much as the entire world appeared to be.

"BWAHAHAHAHA! HASSAN SHOULD KNOW BETTER THAN TO TRY AND PULL THE CAMEL HIDE OVER A MONK'S EYES."

That hideous, glorious laughter shattered the moment of eternity into a million shards that formed the past, present and future once more.

"INDEED ALL CAMEL I SHOW ARE MERE CAMELS BY ANY OTHER NAME, NAMES FOR MEN TO KNOW THEM BY. YOU SEE MY WISE FRIEND, CAMEL IS AS CAMEL DOES."

"And what does camel do?"

I murmured out my reply.

"What is needed."

His hushed hiss echoed with reverence, as if he spoke of some higher power. Though the day was long by then and the sand was hot, to hear this colossus, this behemoth, this goliath, this GOD to speak in awe chilled all that I was.

Gently I was coaxed into movement again, where before he spoke with crashing might and moved with a forceful hand now he urged me forward with the gentleness of a shepherd to his flock. He seemed all the more powerful to me for it.

"I see you are a discerning man when it come to camel, I like that. I like you." He continued in soft tones, resonant with a fraternal feeling.
"I see you travel a path down which no man may follow, a road you fear to tread yourself. To tread oneself, not to be taken lightly."
Mystic words hypnotized me, before I could object or even notice he had seated me in another one of his identical camels.

"Upon this camel you shall take one trip and no more, he will return from your trip without you. But he shall not be alone."

"Where will he take me?"

I asked, even as Hassan shrank from view as he stood atop a dune. Upon the shifting of the sand, in the call of the wind, with the cry of the bird and the drumming of the insect I heard his reply.

"Where needed."

- Sermons of Grand Monk, Lucid Abban, volume six.