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162 After lunch, we went over the ground once more, bagging a few more quail, and then climbed to the summit of the mountain and looked down on the blue, illimitable Pacific; that is to say, we looked down the steep western slope of the mountain in the direction where the blue, illimitable Pacific was, and still is, and probably always will be, located, and would have seen it had it not been hidden beneath a bank of snow-white fog, as solid and impenetrable to the eye as the mountain itself. We could hear the incessant moaning of the sea, as it dashed its waves on the rock-bound coast beneath us, but that was all. The bay where the chivalrous old filibuster and pirate Sir Francis Drake moored his fleet some centuries ago, and from whence he sailed some weeks later, without an idea of the existence of the grand Bay of San Francisco and the glorious country of which the Golden Gate, right under his long, sharp, rakish nose, is the portal, was just below us on the northwest, but it might as well have been a thousand miles away. Point Lobos and Point Bonita were invisible, and the Farrallones were buried countless fathoms deep beneath the fog-bank. All was an utter blank from a point a thousand feet beneath us. Even as we gazed upon it, the bosom of the snowy fog-bank heaved and rocked at the touch of the rising gale; then the whole vast fleecy mass moved inward upon the land, and silently, but with the speed of thought, and apparently with irresistible force, came rushing like a mighty avalanche up the slope of the mountain toward the summit on which we stood. "We shall see nothing, and