Old Ugly-Face by Talbot Mundy

The snowfall had ceased when Andrew overtook Tom in the courtyard. The sun was fighting its way through breaking clouds. Wind, whirling the snow off roofs and walls and piling up deep drifts under archways and cloisters, saved both their lives; monks, as ferocious as hornets, couldn't get at them in sufficient numbers or quickly enough. They were able to dodge from cloister to cloister; they had to keep hiding, pausing, ducking behind columns and into doorways.

Lusty-lunged bull-bellowers, instructed by Old Ugly-face's hermits, were hard at work proclaiming that Ram-pa Yap-shi's fall was due to sinful intrigue with foreigners. Lo and behold, the foreigners! Who should distinguish, in a crisis, between good and bad ones? Old Ugly-face had pitched on Tibet's xenophobia as the basis for his coup d'etat. He was playing it up. In the name of religion, the law, the prophets, and the higher spiritual beings to whom Tibet yearns for guidance, he denounced all foreign influences--at the top of his lungs--to the booming of gongs and the blare of the big radongs that sound like foghorns in a fog-bound sea.