Hello, gentle listener, and welcome to Nocturnal Transmissions, the fortnightly podcast that brings you dark tales, both old and new, performed by your humble narrator, Kristen

Holland.

Well, how long has it been since we last featured a story from Clark Ashton Smith?

Too long is the correct answer, gentle listener.

This episode, we are riffling back

through the pages of good old weird tales magazine

in order to revisit one of his creepy musings

on the red planet.

Abtly named, gentle listener, aptly named.

Nocturnal transmissions is proud to present Clark Ashton Smith's, the vaults of you, Fombus. If the doctors are correct in their prognostication, I have only a few Martian hours of life remaining to me.

In those hours I shall endeavor to relate as a warning to others who might follow in our footsteps.

The singular and frightful happenings that terminated our researches among the ruins of yo fumbus.

If my story will only serve to prevent future explorations,

the telling will not have been in vain. There were eight of us, professional archaeologists

with more or less terrain and interplanetary experience, who set forth with native guides from Ignar, the commercial

metropolis of Mars, to inspect that ancient, eon deserted city.

Alan Octave, our official leader, held his primacy by knowing more about Martian archaeology than any other

terrestrial on the planet, and others of the party such as William Harper and Jonas Halgren

had been associated with him in many of his previous researchers. I, Rodney Severn, was more of a

newcomer, having spent but a few months on Mars, and the greater part of my own ultra-terrene delvings, had been confined to Venus.

The nude, spongy-chested A-haze had spoken deterringly of vast deserts filled with ever-swirling sandstorms,

through which we must pass to reach Yovambus. And in spite of our munificent offers of payment,

...