With these precautions, on the 20th, at eleven o'clock, they left the well at Terfowey, after having warned the women that their chance of seeing their husband again depended wholly upon his and their faithful conduct. They then took their prisoner with them, his right hand being chained to the left hand of one of the Barbarins. They had scarcely got into the plain when they felt great symptoms of the simoom; and about a quarter before twelve, their prisoner first, and then Idris, cried out, "The simoom! the simoom!" "My curiosity," says Bruce, "would not suffer me to fall down without looking behind me. About due south, a little to the east, I saw the coloured haze as before. It seemed now to be rather less compressed, and to have with it a shade of blue. The edges of it were not defined as those of the former, but like a very thin smoke, with about a yard in the middle tinged with those colours. We all fell upon our faces, and the simoom passed with a gentle ruffling wind. It continued to blow in this manner till near three o'clock; so we were all taken ill that night, and scarcely strength was left us to load the camels and arrange the baggage. This day one of our camels died, partly famished, partly overcome with extreme fatigue; so that, incapable as we were of labour, we were obliged, for self-preservation's sake, to cut off thin slices of the fleshy part of the camel, and hang it in so many thongs upon the trees all night, and after upon the baggage, the sun drying it immediately, so as to prevent putrefaction." At half past eight in the evening they alighted at a brackish well called Naibey, in a bare, sandy plain, where there were a few straggling acacia-trees. They found near the well the corpse of a man and two camels; it was apparently long since that their deaths had taken place, for the camels were so dried up that their remains would weigh but a very few pounds; no vermin had touched them, for in this whole desert there is neither worm, fly, nor anything that has in it the breath of life. On the 21st, at six in the morning, having filled the girbas with water, they set out from Naibey. The first hour of the journey was among sharp-pointed rocks, which, it was easy to foresee, would very soon disable the camels. At about eight they had a view of the desert to the westward as before, and saw that the sands had already begun to rise in immense twisted pillars, which darkened the heavens. The rising of these so early in the morning was a sure sign of a hot day, of a calm about midday, and of its being followed by two hours of the poisonous wind, which Bruce and his suffering companions dreaded more than any affliction that could assail them. The moving columns were this day more magnificent than any they had yet seen, being thicker, and containing more sand; and, the sun shining through them, they appeared as if spotted with stars of gold.