Originally published Weird Tales February 1939
Our narrator works for the Stellar Bros. Circus. Times being hard, the owner and o.n. go on a cruise trip to Asia in search of rare talent to bring in as star attractions for the show. They come back with the Rajah of Jadhore, a little postage stamp in the Malaysia area (remember, 1930's maps) and his Sacred White Elephant. And the High Priestess of the Temple of Ganesha who looks after the Sacred White Elephant.
Now the Rajah is a modern guy who wears suits with his turban, but the High Priestess is traditional to the core, and really weird, and smokin' hot. And the Sacred White Elephant is actually silvery gray, seems to have an intelligence that's better than animal cunning, and hard-on against the world.
And the Rajah has a warning. The elephant, an incarnation of the god Ganesha, has a much darker side. The roots of Ganesha lie in a much darker entity - Chaugnar Faun in Tibet, Tsathoggua in prehistoric times. He's bad news, and the circus folks better watch it.
Well, bad luck starts hitting the circus and people start dying left and right. And the Rajah confesses its the doing of the SWE and the High Priestess. Finally having enough, he sacrifices himself to take them both out - spectacularly. In the ring, of course!
A minor but fun bit of tongue-in-cheek horror from Mr. Bloch. Interestingly, this one was missed by Lin Carter in the days when he put together the almost-definitive Mysteries of the Worm collection of Bloch's Cthulhu stories - perhaps because it was published under the psuedonym Nathan Hindin. It's actually a sequel to an earlier (and better) Stellar Bros. Circus story, "Fangs of Vengeance", also published as by Hindin.
In any case, this is no major loss to MoW, as its nothing too special as a story and any Mythosery is pretty minor. It is certainly the only place I've ever seen Tsathoggua and Chaugnar Faun described as the same being, but Bloch always did play fast and loose with the arcana (and good for him, say I!).
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