“The Faceless God” (Weird Tales, May 1936)

Bloch, Robert. “The Faceless God” Weird Tales, May 1936, pp. 565-576. https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v27n05_1936-05_sas/page/n53/mode/2up
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The story opens with Doctor Stugatche torturing a helpless man who is strapped to a table. He seeks information about an idol, and he thinks the man at the tip of his knife has information. The doctor is an Egyptologist of ill repute, one who has been banished from respectable academic circles and who is now in it for the money. He heard indirectly about an immense idol that a passing caravan stumbled upon and hurriedly abandoned out of fear. Dr. Stugatche has no such fear. He wants to know the location so that he can plunder the treasure for himself. He sees it as a certain path to riches and fame. Armed with the torture-wrought information, he assembles a small band and finds the idol. It is described as “monstrous, both in subject and in execution. He saw the writhing, worm-like shapes of primal monsters, and headless, slimy creatures from the stars. There were bloated beasts in the robes of men, and ancient Egyptian gods in hideous combat with squirming demons from the gulf. Some of the designs were foul beyond description, and others hinted of unclean terrors that were old when the world was young. 

But all were evil; and Stugatche, cold and callous though he was, could not gaze at them without feeling a horror that ate at his brain” (568). And if the doctor was afraid, his workers were terrified. They refused to work and demanded that the doctor leave the idol, which they called Nyarlathotep, alone. They returned to work at gunpoint and uncovered the giant statue, and the doctor scoffed at their primitive beliefs. In the night, however, the men had escaped silently, leaving the doctor alone in the trackless desert. The idol faced north, and so the doctor would use that to help him walk the many miles to the nearest oasis. Unfortunately for the doctor, the fleeing workers had re-buried the idol, as leaving his only navigational clue out of reach. He chose a direction at random, and he walked until he collapsed under the heat of the desert sun. He dreamt he was being cruelly and painfully hunted by Nyarlathotep. Finally, he awoke to the searing pain of the desert sun. He struggled forward hoping for luck in finding a wayward caravan. He began to hallucinate, including a vision of the faceless god pursuing him. He ran until he saw nothing but statues of horrors all around him. And still Nyarlathotep’s black shadow pursued him. When Stugatche crested the dune above his camp, he was a broken man, He used his last bit of desperate energy to run toward the boulders that marked the buried Idol. The sand opened up and swallowed him—mostly. The next morning show only his head above the sand. Soon the vultures arrived… 
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This story traffics in second-hand Cthulhu lore, including a half page of history of the idol and the cultural background for it. It also features Bloch’s childhood interest in Egyptology, as Randall Larson points out (Larson Robert 20). Most interesting to me, however, is the character of Dr. Stugatche, whose name so closely resembles the Italian vulgarity “stugots” that it cannot be a coincidence. He begins the way so many of Lovecraft’s heroes begin, with a clear flaw that leads to their doom. In this case, however, Bloch complicates things. Stugatche is certainly a terrible person, torturing a helpless camel tender and then going out to dinner with a smile on his face. When he is abandoned in the desert, however, he felt some kinship and empathy with the man who only pages before was a means to an end and no more: “His fat lips quivered with fear as he thought of the pain, the torture. He had no desire to suffer the anguish of that fellow he had put on the rack. The poor devil had not looked very pleasant there” (572). This is the first bit of depth of character in a published Bloch story, and it makes for a deeper reader experience. The moment of insight into the character comes and goes, but it is there. For the final half of the story, he does what he must, what anyone in his situation would do. The desert is unforgiving, and so his path was doom. But there was that flash of insight that makes this a really interesting story.