Jimgrim by Talbot Mundy

Few conspiracies succeed unless the key-note is sheer simplicity. Even then they succeed because other men overlook such dangers as a blind man might be counted on to see. We were blind conspirators; and we had to be simple. There was nothing else under the stars that we possibly could be.

Grim led through gloom until we found an open door into a passage lined with cell doors and lighted by one oil lamp. We knew then we were in a monastery. At the far end the passage turned a corner. Near the middle of the passage was a Tibetan stairway, which consists of a single wooden upright with cross-pieces nailed to it. We took that and climbed into a room that had a door which opened on a long roof with a waist-high parapet. There was a set-back and the building went one floor higher, Tibetan in every line, with overhanging semi-Chinese eaves. The undressed stone wall was vaguely blue with light reflected from below where the breast-shaped ovens were with their long slots like gashes in Halloween pumpkins, near the bottom of each of the thirty or forty, or perhaps more -- I had no time to count them.