When, in 1853-1855, American engineers harnessed St. Marys Falls as lifting power, they outraged all precedents by building two locks in tandem, each 350 feet long and 70 feet wide, with a 9-foot lift.

But in 1881 these were outstripped by the Weitzel lock, 515 feet in length and 80 feet in maximum width; and 15 years later this was in turn outstripped by the Poe lock, 800 feet long and 100 feet wide. Finally, 1919 beheld the Sault banded by the world's two greatest locks. These have a usable length of 1,350 feet (thus exceeding the Panama locks by 350 feet), a width of 80 feet, and they carry a depth of 241⁄2 feet of water.

Locks? Say, rather, the keys that unlock economic wealth! Of iron, copper, grain, and other commodities, more than 90,000,000 tons, valued at about $1,250,000,000, have been "unlocked" on St. Marys Falls Ship Canal in a single eightmonths' season. In general, the Sault's annual traffic greatly exceeds that of the Panama, the Suez, the Kiel, and the Manchester ship canals combined.

Conservative computation shows that, after deducting operating costs and interest on the investment, the Soo canal system has saved in freight charges in one year nearly $90,000,000. And while, in fact, all vessels have passed toll-free ever since its transference to the Federal Government, in 1881, one may estimate its annual cost at under four mills per freight-ton handled.

In view of the Northwest's vast grain contributions and realizing that the Lake Superior region furnishes more than fourfifths of our iron ore, one perceives that any catastrophe befalling the Soo locks would reverberate economically through the East and even across the Atlantic. The iron-using trades would be paralyzed, armies of factory workers would be laid off, and England would experience a serious diminution in American flour. As to the consequent glut of commodities, 25 railway tracks to the seaboard and freight cars by the tens of thousands would be needed to cope with it.

Departure from Michigan by a freighter at the Sault makes one's farewell view of the State a truly impressive one. Indeed, you are doubly in luck if you can secure such accommodation. What is called "per

sonal service" is magnificently eclipsed when some friendly official says he will ship you on the finest vessel passing that day. It means you will have your pick of 75 ships, for that is the average number clearing the locks every 24 hours.

While waiting, you watch the extraordinary sight of great vessels, inclosed in parallel locks, playing at slow-motion seesaw, as they rise or descend on their respective ways to Lake Superior or Lake Huron. Then one, which but just now looked as high as a house, sinks imperceptibly to the quay and you climb aboard.

Some 750 main vessels, or 1,200 in all, form the Great Lakes freight fleet. Nine of the biggest of these, lying stem to stern, would extend a mile. An ore carrier's cargo runs to 15,000 tons, and the loading of this is indeed a speed spectacle. Shot from pockets, through spouts, and into the ship's hold, a cargo of 14,000 tons has been loaded thus in 161⁄2 minutes.

As your vessel drops down to Detroit and thence out upon Lake Erie, there is ever along the horizon some faint plume of smoke which tells of those tireless carriers, which, by day and night, through calm or storm, silently pursue their tasks in the work of national development.

MICHIGAN'S HISTORY IS INSEPARABLE

FROM HER LAKES

If you would understand Michigan, arrive and depart by water; for the Lakes are inseparably bound up with her history, her development, her future. Between Monsieur Nicolet's arrival in Michigan and to-day, when industrially she ranks third or fourth among our States and produces yearly more than four billion dollars' worth of manufactures, there lies an economic development which would have stunned the Chinahunting Frenchman's comprehension.

Reflecting on this, one wonders anew what symbol, better expressive of her progress, should replace that of the mitten.

Reach or leave Detroit by water, and your first glimpse, your last memory, is of its slim, towering stacks, grouped in fives, etched against the sky. They are like the upward-reaching fingers of some colossal hand. And perhaps that is the State's truest symbol. Michigan has stripped off the lumberjack's mitten and reveals the giant hand of industrial achievement.

HAT with snakes, jungle fever, and nice striped tigers that dote on artists, you'll not get many pictures. Besides, rainstorms in the Dutch Indies last forty days and nights, and it's hotter there than the middle kettle of Hades."

With such serio-comic banter California friends heard my plans to sail for that Enchanted Isle of Bali, away over in east

ern seas.

In every man's dreams there is always one favorite spot, somewhere, that he hopes some day to see. It may be a country itself; it may be its people, its great cities or art treasures; it may be but the primordial urge to fight for the sheer adventure of it-to seek romance in strange lands. But, some time in his life, the man of any imagination feels the call to far places. So it came that I went to Bali, that beautiful but little-known island of flowers and modern Eves, lying off beaten tourist trails, east of Java.

THE MAGIC OF AUTOCHROMES MAKES THE ARTIST A GEOGRAPHER

For years I was a painter of miniatures. Faces, beautiful and dull, ugly and interesting, passed before my brush.

Then came the magic of autochromes. By color photography, millions who read this magazine may glimpse the glories of Nature-God's own great studio. Like an artist's brush, now the camera catches every tint and shade from Arizona desert or Alpine sunset to the gorgeous panoply of Indian rajah courts and the bronze beauty of jungle maids asplash in lotus pools.

So it came I laid down my brushes and took up the color plates. And from the Ganges to the Great Wall, from Pyramids to Buddhist temples, I have wandered. To catch their color and portray these dream places to the millions here at home who long to see them-that, now, is my

avocation.

It was tropic dawn-the soft, soothing, hazy dawn of a calm East Indian day— when we anchored off Buleleng, the town of many natives and a few Dutch on Bali's northern coast.

Brown men in a small boat took me ashore through blue-green surf; then set me down with my bags alone on the beach. It is a hybrid, palm-shaded town, part Dutch tin roofs and part the thatched huts of natives, this Beleleng, the first point of contact between an encroaching outer world and long-isolate Bali. But no hotel runners, no cab or taxi men leaped at me from the coconut groves. The island, as yet, knows them not. In fact, nobody paid me the slightest attention.

Half nude women, market - bound, marched by in stately parade, burdens on their heads. Lean dogs filed along. each intent on his own affairs. There passed a man with a red rooster tucked under his arm, and two small boys lugging a grunting sow in a wicker cage. But not one of them even looked at me. On Bali I was to learn that "mind your own business" is an unwritten law.

In fact, I might be there yet-alone on that Bali beach-had not a friendly white man, Andre Roosevelt, suddenly appeared. He was the one and only American living there, and he spoke the island tongue.

"Till you find shelter," he said, “I can put you up."

WHERE BIRDS TALK AND BUTTERFLIES
FLY LIKE BIRDS

"Bali is a peculiar place," explained my host later, over our breakfast of bananas and rice. "Here books are bound from tree leaves. Religion is the chief occupation. Trial marriage usually takes. It's a land of the slimmest women and the fattest pigs. Birds talk and butterflies fly like birds. Praying to pagan gods and fooling pagan devils are the main pastimes. Tourist attractions are many, but

tourists few. Our island lies hard by the big path of round-the-world trippers, yet few see it or even hear of it. "It's a social and sociological curiosity, this island of Bali. Its natives are what biologists might call 'sports' in East Indian ethnology.

"It lies a night's cruise east of Java. It's about 90 miles long, with a 10,500 foot peak and more than a million peaceful, polygamous people. Its women are the fairest in all Malaysia-and a dressmaker would starve."

BALINESE BEAUTIES PROVE CAMERA-SHY

Happily, aided by my host, I found John, a Bali boy interpreter. A willing young guide he was, mixing Dutch with broken English and Malay, only to break out in voluble Balinese when excited. "You make picture? Gewis! I show you temple, flowers-and much purty girl."

But, as a diplomat, John's work had lumps in it. Time and again I glimpsed a pretty face and wanted to photograph it, only to have the girl run away when John asked her to pose.

There was one girl in particular on that island, a veritable Venus-straight, slimlimbed, graceful as a deer. Often I got fleeting glimpses of her. Sometimes she would be bathing with other girls in a wayside pool, or walking sedately to the temple with an offering of fruit or flowers. Time and again I sought to take her picture, but caught only the flash of her dazzling smile as she flitted swiftly away. In vain John pursued her. He might as well have shouted at a shy bird of paradise!

As John and I worked our way across Bali, toward its south shore, I was amazed to see how densely peopled it is, and how intensely tilled. Coco palms and tamarinds sway over the paths and rice fields are everywhere, even terraced far up the hillsides, as in Java, Japan, and the Igorot country.

The quest for photographic adventure along these island paths, past green fields, temples, and walled villages, is an endless delight-unless a carabao suddenly flounders up from the mud to chase the white man. Bali children ride these clumsy creatures, and even when one runs amuck it is said a small boy swishing a switch.

through the air may cause the mad beast to turn aside in his charge. But here, as in the Philippines, there seems to be something in the looks or smell of a white Iman which the carabao doesn't like.

Once I sat for hours beside a pool, where carabaos lay half-submerged in a cooling siesta, waiting for the beasts to lumber out, so that I might photograph them. Once or twice I threw clods and yelled, trying to make them come ashore. But, with their sweeping horns and black faces level with the water, they only stared and emitted long, sighing grunts. Finally, in despair, I "shot" an ancient winebibber who came along the path, carrying two jars of the palm wine which Bali drinks when it "throws a party." (See Color Plate VII.)

Odd drippings of gum, looking like icicles, hung from a tree beside the path, as I walked back to the village, and from a wayside pool several girls, interrupted at their afternoon bath, scrambled out and ran away, carrying their scant sarongs, at my approach. "Wing shooting," so to speak, would have been my only chance. for a picture here; but autochromes are not adapted to moving subjects.

Such butterflies as one sees in Bali! Orange and white, black and yellow, or black and green, and huge purple ones, all flying like birds, not fluttering, as ours do. And there were wild chickens in the woods, the cocks brilliantly colored, and a talking bird they call the beo, a black, sluggish fowl with dangling yellow wattles-an ugly thing, like a wattled old

woman.

THE PICS OF BALI ARE CURIOSITIES

The Bali village is a group of kampongs or compounds. Each surrounds several little houses and a few smaller structures used as granaries and built high to save the grain from pigs and rats. One house may shelter several families. Usually the Bali hut itself is a small, nipalike, thatched affair, with a frame of poles. A few feet above the ground is a platform, where one sees the family lying around at ease during much of the day. But whenever I approached one of these family groups with my camera, the members of the household would roll off the platforms. and sidle over to the next house.

The Bali pig is a physical curiosity like a dachshund with a pig's make-up. Even in infancy his tummy almost drags on the ground. In youth he has no youthful figure. He is "underslung," so to speak, and could never travel a road with "high centers." The older he gets, the bigger his waistline. And his back sags like that of an old family nag ridden when too young.

Bali, too, is the land of big noise. There's no brawling, but if it isn't the native orchestra, it is the roosters that keep up the racket. They crow by the thousands, long before day. Before they quit, the pigs begin to squeal—not from hunger, for they're all fat. Foraging in Foraging in the cool of the morning or lying in midday shade, I heard them testing their squealers. They seem to want to tell the world that here no Moslem prejudice against pork can cramp any pig's style or restrain him from self-expression.

I saw these Bali pigs, each in his own wicker cage like a prize bird, being loaded on ship for export to Singapore. The deck was piled five tiers high with the fat, waddling creatures, whose squealing chorus almost drowned out the ship's

siren.

Here pork is the only meat eaten. Cattle are raised, but for export. Big, brown, beautiful creatures they are, with a singular white patch on their hind quarters. Seen from behind, they look as if they were wearing white pants. I was told that at times the bulls figure in a religious ceremony and are decorated with big bells, but I saw none of this.

GRACEFUL WALKERS BEAR HEAVY BURDENS ON THEIR HEADS

Everywhere I met streams of people walking, walking-and always carrying something on their heads. If it wasn't a half-nude girl with a 50-pound temple offering of fruit and flowers balanced on her head (see Color Plate I) it was a small boy balancing an empty bottle there, or a man with a bundle of sugar cane, a basket of rice, or coconuts, heavy enough to make any union porter in America rub his shoulder and ask for another two bits.

During the years when I painted, I knew many famous models in American

and European art centers, but I recall few specimens of the human race so easy to look at as the beautiful women of Bali. Erect, slender-limbed, small of wrist and ankle, with tapering fingers, and long, wavy tresses falling over a smooth skin nearly white or light bronze; with perfect, even teeth and a singular grace and dignity of carriage, they have few physical equals among womankind.

A BALINESE DRAMA IS CHIEFLY SPECTACLE

Strolling one afternoon through a shady coconut grove, I heard the marimbalike rumble of the gamelan, or native orchestra (see Color Plate III). Guided by its hollow drumbeats, I came presently upon a crowd of natives squatting about the sylvan stage of an open-air theater.

Though the girl players' words were as Comanche to me, from their gestures and pantomime I caught at bits of plot in this Balinese drama.

But it was the spectacle itself—the gorgeous golden gowns and ornate headdress of the Bali showgirls, the graceful, symbolic measures and postures of their ancient dance-that enthralled me. training of these girls begins at the age of five; at 12 or 14 they cease dancing and return to village life.

The

Here the play's the thing, and all over the island the drama and the dance go on throughout the year. But a playwright would starve; and no "new steps" are ever introduced by Bali dancing girls. Here there's never a "first night" nor a new show. To-day Bali enjoys the same songs, dances, and drama it knew centuries ago, all based on island folklore, mythology, and historical legends. Yet nobody seems bored. Even the children know the lines and songs by heart; they follow the players' every word and gesture with close attention.

Such demons as ruin the rice crops or bring disease to carabao, and the demigods who have influenced the lives of the Balinese through the centuries, figure in the songs and drama.

Shows are usually given in the daytime, against a temple or a natural back drop of jungle green.

When one performance was over, my interpreter sought the headman of the near-by village where the dancing girls