In the evening the caravan was joined by twenty Turks from Caramania, in Asia Minor. They were mounted on camels, and armed with swords, a short gun, and a brace of pistols in their girdles. Having been informed that the large tent belonged to an Englishman, they came to it without ceremony. They told Bruce that they were pilgrims going to Mecca; that they had been very badly treated in travelling from Alexandria; that one of the swimming thieves of the Nile had boarded their vessel, and carried off a portmanteau containing about two hundred sequins in gold; that the Bey of Girge had given them no redress; and, therefore, hearing that an Englishman was in the caravan, they had come to him to propose they should join in defending each other against all common enemies. "I cannot conceal," says Bruce, "the secret pleasure I had in finding the character of my country so firmly established among nations so distant, enemies to our religion, and strangers to our government. Turks from Mount Taurus, and Arabs from the desert of Libya, thought themselves unsafe among their own countrymen, but trusted their lives and their little fortunes implicitly to the direction and word of an Englishman whom they had never before seen!"
The caravan was detained at Legeta the whole of the 18th by the arrival of these Turks; but early in the morning of the 19th they proceeded along a narrow plain, hemmed in by barren hills, of a brown, calcined colour, like the cinders on the sides of Vesuvius. Passing some mountains of green and red marble, they came into a plain called Hamra, where they first observed the red sand; and on the morning of the 20th, after having mounted some hills of porphyry, they began to descend. At noon they came to a few single acacia-trees, which, after rain, form a station for the Atouni Arabs, and at night they encamped on a small barren plain. On the 21st, in passing some defiles, they were alarmed by a false report that the Arabs were approaching. At noon they encamped at Mesag el Terfowey, where they obtained the first fresh water which they had tasted since they left the Nile. Next morning, before daybreak, the caravan was again in motion, having learned that, only two days before, three hundred of the Atouni had watered at Terfowey.