And when we began to reach the end of Long Reach and to get into the wide open waters of Sea Reach and the fog shut us in completely many a person then was not altogether sorry, for he had been surfeited with it all. We went down to dinner just as the ships began to feel the Pacific's swells. The wind from the northwest began to blow violently and soon after 8 o'clock word was passed that we had passed Cape Pilar, where no shipwrecked mariner ever escapes, and that the fog had lifted and those on the bridge had caught a glimpse of it. There had been thirty miles of fog navigation in the strait itself. Two hours later as the ship was plunging and careening in the gale--they always have a gale or extremely heavy swells at the Pacific entrance to Magellan--we heard that the Evangelistas Islands, four rugged rocks with a light on one, had been seen, and then we turned in, knowing that in an hour or so the fleet would be headed due north, every turn of the screws bringing us nearer home. On the whole, every one was glad that if the fog was to be it had shut off the view of the mountains and glaciers and bays just after it had been finest. We had seen the strait at its best and there was not a man who did not feel something of awe over it, believing as he did that he had been in sight of the grandest handiwork of the Creator that the earth presents. "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters. "And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so." Any one who has sailed through the Strait of Magellan can easily believe it was there that God began to divide the waters from the waters. Any one also who has sailed through the strait into the heaving, tossing Pacific, wrongly named for that part of the world, could realize the full significance of what was in the heart of a sailor of the midwatch who sang softly to himself as you passed him: "Rocked in the cradle of the deep!" CHAPTER IX IN AND OUT OF VALPARAISO HARBOR Courtesy That Means Cordial Relations for Many Years--Eight Hundred Guns Proclaim Peace--President Montt Reviews Ships and Congratulates by Wireless--Wonderful Sailing of the Battleships Amid Thick Fog on the Rolling Pacific--Formation Preserved in the Dark--Great Scene in the Sunlight as the Armada Swept In Near the Shore and Thundered Salutations to Vast Throng of Chileans--The Animated "Welcome" Sign--Meeting With the Chicago. _On Board U. S. S. Louisiana, U. S. Battle Fleet_, AT SEA, Feb. 15.