originally published Weird Tales #4, 1983
Z'hu Gthaa, savant of the Ninth Circle, a resident of ancient K'nyan, is unhappy because his fellow K'nyan-ians would rather lounge around and engage in kinky sexual practices than indulge in the obviously more pleasurable act of studying the lore and magic of the ancient serpent-people of Yoth.
Z'hu is determined, among other things, to learn why the serpent-people abandoned Yoth for other parts of the globe, after taking up the worship of Tsathoggua over Yig, their original deity of choice. To this end, he descends into the even-more-subterranean-than-K'nyan region of Yoth. There he soon finds the ruins of the serpent city of Zzoon. Hieroglyphs there lead him even further, to a place called Ngoth, which turns out to be a big pit surrounded by megaliths. While farting around in Zzoon, he is constantly menaced by giant snakes which take out several of his pack animals and slaves.
The hieroglyphs on the stones tell him the rest of the story. The serpent-people didn't leave. Yig revenged himself on them for turning to Mr. Toad-Blob, and turned them all into giant snakes. The same giant snakes that have caused Z'hu all this trouble, and are now closing in on him, outnumbering his party vastly, as his atomic gun weapon runs out of charges...
Even by Lin Carter standards, this isn't much more than a throwaway; another Smith pastiche, this time set in the subterranean lands Lovecraft invented in "The Mound." There's not much of a story here and the whole thing seems almost tongue-in-cheek.
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