Old Ugly-Face by Talbot Mundy

Revolting filth and a breath-snatching stink, which not even the Tibetan wind could deal with, increased the sensation of being close to the village, although they couldn't yet see it. Huge dogs announced its neighborhood--from over by the cemetery, where the rhagbyas had carried a recent human corpse and had dismembered it with axes. But no sign of the rhagbya carriers-out-of-the-dead: perhaps they had seen, and were scared, and had run for cover. The dogs were quarreling with vultures for the fragments of human meat, but some of them found time to do their duty and bay downwind, threatening all comers. There was no other threat--no sign of armed men, nor even of a lookout--only smoke, rising over a dune and flattened by the wind into a long smear, like a brush stroke reaching to the sunset on the far horizon.

Bompo Tsering and the baggage train were waiting in a group in a hollow. Beyond that was a gap between yellow dunes. Framed in the gap was the turquoise sky.