THE foods of the Hunza, as stated in the first chapter, consist of grains, wheat, barley, buckwheat, and small grains; leafy green vegetables, potatoes (introduced half a century ago), other root vegetables, peas and beans; gram or chick pea, and other pulses; fresh milk and buttermilk or lassi; clarified butter and cheese; fruit, chiefly apricots and mulberries, fresh and sun-dried; meat on rare occasions; and sometimes wine made from grapes. Their children are breast-fed up to three years, it being considered unjust to the living child for its lactation to be interrupted by a maternal pregnancy.
The Hunza do not take tea, rice, sugar, or eggs. Chickens in a confined area destroy crops and are not kept.
Looking through the diet, it will be seen that there is nothing strange to the westerner in the Hunza foods. All of them, except perhaps one or two of the smaller grain foods, are common to both peoples.
The difference lies in the way they are eaten and the way they are cultivated. It is upon these differences that the better health and physique of the Hunza in the major part depends.
Of cereal foods the Hunza prefer wheat, which they themselves grow and which they also get by barter from the Nagiris. Sometimes chick pea is ground up with the wheat, sometimes beans, barley, and peas are ground together. From the wheat-flour they make their bread or chapattis.
This bread is the first of the Hunza foods that differs from the western bread. The Hunza prefers wheat for his bread, so do the English. In this they are alike. But in making it into bread they differ.
The difference is in the grinding. The Hunza grind so that the greater part of the grain appears in the flour. Their resulting bread is wholemeal bread. It is like the Kleiebrot upon which Professor Hindhede fed the Danes, but without the extra bran. It has, of course, its own bran.
The westerners grind their flour to a fine white powder and of this make their bread, which differs from the wholemeal bread in its appearance and its lack of valuable parts of the grain.
McCarrison spoke of the Hunza diet as consisting of "the unsophisticated foods of Nature"; foods not subjected to artificial processes before they reach the consumer. A "sophist" is defined in the English Encyclopaedia Dictionary as "a cunning and skilful man, a teacher of arts and sciences for money." Sophistication for reasons of money does not occur in Hunza.
The Hunza grow their own wheat, but some, as has been said, they get by barter from the Nagiris. They grind it between stones and make their unleavened chapattis from the fresh flour or they take the grain to the mills, where it is made into flour and stored in large chests. They therefore do not eat Nature's foods as they are. Only in the summer do they eat young green corn raw and direct. Otherwise they manipulate it by grinding and cooking.
The westerners do the same. They manipulate and cook their corn to make it into bread. But in their case the term "sophisticated" can be attached to their bread. Art and money both enter into and modify its manufacture.
At one time the British flour was much like the Hunza flour. Then came the introduction of the steam-driven machine, the industrial era and a huge increase of population. More wheat was urgently needed.
In response to this demand the steel-faced plough was invented in America about 1840. This plough solved the problem of grass. Previously grass made a firm matting over the earth, and its removal by hand labour was infinitely tedious. The plough cut up even the tough grass of the prairie and turned the sod upside down so that the exposed roots died.
The virgin soil was exposed, and having the stored soil's food of rotted grass, it yielded excellent crops of wheat. The time came when this store was partly exhausted, but for a long while the wheat-fields answered the hungry call of the increasing manufacturing areas.
The Americans soon erected mills and exported the flour instead of the grain. Now, the part of the grain from which the new plant starts to grow or germ is oily. It is, as one might expect, the part of the grain which best assists the sexual powers of the animal who eats it. It invigorates the whole animal through the strengthening of the reproductive system.
But the wheat germ oil which has this potent effect has a great disadvantage from the point of view of a world trade, such as the opening up of the American prairies offered. If ground up with the flour, the flour was apt to go sour with keeping and on long journeys.
So the germ was eliminated by the commercial milling process.
Covering the wheat grain is a skin -- the bran. This protects the grain, as all living skins protect. They all protect in a living way, not merely in a mechanical way like a wall or covering. They can regrow themselves if injured, and beneath and within them they store substances upon which they can call to strengthen their efforts.
In the commercial process of milling this branny skin was also removed. If it stayed behind, it made the flour less white. More of it made the flour brown, and the resulting bread brown bread. Brown bread may be just white flour and bran without the germ, or it may be wholemeal bread, or it may be wholemeal bread with extra bran, like Hindhede's bread.
Whichever it is, it is tinged or coloured. But the new milling turned out a white, or bolted flour, free of the germ and free of the protective skin, and consisting only of the store, chiefly of starch, set aside in the grain to feed the infant plant. Ground into powder, this made a nice-looking white flour which did not go sour with storing, could be carried by trains and ships all over the world and be made into tasty and clean-looking loaves wherever it finally arrived.
But it lacked the supreme vitality area of the grain, the germ, and it lacked the protective skin.
The Hunza bread does not lack these two parts of the grain. This alone might account for the Hunza's lack of nerves and vigour into old age, for they are great bread eaters. It might also account in part for the sexual disabilities that occur in modern cities and its accompaniments of treatment -- commercial nostrums and literature.
Whether this is so or not, the plain fact remains that a part of the grain is thrown away for commercial and aesthetic reasons; that is to say, for sophisticated reasons from the point of view of food as primary.
There is certainly no instinct in people to guide them to the better bread of the two; for instinct and appetite cannot be regarded as guides in food matters to-day. They have themselves been so successfully put through the mill of modern commercialism that they have been stripped of reliability. On this point the League of Nations Committee's Report upon The Problem of Nutrition declares: "It must be realised that instinct and appetite alone cannot be regarded as reliable guides in the choice of food." And McCollum and Simmonds are more emphatic on this very question of the general acceptance or preference of white flour: "This (the polishing of rice) and the artificially established liking for white flour and white cornmeal," they write in italics, "is an illustration of the failure of the instinct of man to serve as a safe guide in the selection of food. The aesthetic sense is appealed to in greatest measure in this case by the lowest biologic values."
That original but insufficiently known thinker, Mr. Matthias Alexander, teaches that the chief defect in modern man is that progress and civilization have proceeded so rapidly that they have outstripped the instincts. The instincts are very slow in their selective formation, and progress has pushed forward at such a speed that it has been impossible for the instincts to keep pace with it. He himself stresses this particularly in the bodily posture, which must impress any observer of urban man. Writing, as I do, in a large public library, the postures of those who are writing amply illustrate Alexander's teaching. They are round-shouldered and ungainly. There is only one writer who I noted write with an arrow-straight back, and on enquiry I found that he had been through Alexander's training.
In the matter of food, and particularly in the public favour given to wholemeal bread, this outstripping of the instinct is most noticeable. It is not because wholemeal bread is not tasty. It is a very pleasant bread to the taste, and Hindhede's Kleiebrot is not only tasty but bakes excellently. Nevertheless, men's instincts are not strong enough for its general adoption now, nor were they strong enough to reject white bread at its initial introduction, although, in regard to vitamin B1 alone the best-fed people of today get less of this vital element than did the parish poor of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
As Alexander states, if man wishes to regain his pristine health and bodily vigour he has to abandon any reliance on instinct and save himself by knowledge or conscious control.
This can be done by the individual in the matter of bread, for the wholemeal bread is procurable. But to change the habit of the western world is a stupendous task, and one to which its governments have given little attention. For wholemeal bread is a matter of freshness. The Hunza takes his bread fresh from his own fields; we often from great distances, because, though less fresh and vital, it is cheap.
One sees, then, in this respect the value of national self-sufficiency, which has long been a political faith in France and is now one in Germany and has had such an influence on other countries of the west. National self-sufficiency in its principal foods is undoubtedly a necessity, if a nation is to attain to the health that is possible. We who desire to base life on physiology must assert this as an axiom.
It has been said that Britain could not produce enough food for its own people. On the other hand, that great authority, Prince Kropotkin, calculated that she could produce sufficient food for 100,000,000 people. Anyone who has compared the meticulous care and agrarian economy of China and Japan with the empty grass fields of Britain is forced to the conclusion that the effort to make Britain self-sufficient in food is lacking. In spite of our physiological conviction of the need, the Returns of the Ministry of Agriculture for the last year, ending June 1936, show that progress is still physiological regress. In that year 33,100 more workers were drawn from the land, and this was not caused by mechanisation. No less than 284,900 acres went out of cultivation, 69,000 of these being wheat acres. Potato acreage decreased 7,000 acres. Pigs have decreased by 11,000 breeding sows, cattle by 7,100 head, and chickens to the figure of 884,000. The only increase, possibly in answer to the teachings of the nutritionists, has been in green vegetables, 7,000 acres, and carrots, 1,000 acres.
To sum up, the advantages of the Hunza bread are that it is physiologically economical, for the whole grain is used. Nothing is lost. It is also fresh. It comes from their own fields with the same freshness as fruit and vegetables come from our gardens.
There is one other difference, and that is cultivation. The Hunza, as we shall see in this chapter, have an admirable cultivation. They, moreover, have an irrigation from the mountains, and this spreads a fine silt over the land each year, which is comparable to the silt that is spread over the Egyptian corn-fields by the Nile.
Opposed to this are the prairies of the new world, which yield such magnificent crops in their virginal state. The nitrogen and other nourishment are supplied by the decay of the grass until the steel plough roots up the grass and destroys it. To them no silt comes annually. After some years of cropping, they have, therefore, to be fed, and they are given chemical manures. There is reason to believe, as will be seen later, that the quality of the grains has deteriorated owing to this. In the recent Lloyd Roberts lecture McCarrison said that in India the same grain, when grown on the same soil and watered in the same way, was of higher nutritive value when the soil had been manured with natural farmyard manure than when manured with artificial chemical manure. It is what one would expect. "Nature," as Dr. Lawrie entitles his iconoclastic book, "hits back."
We all live on milk for a number of months in that period of our lives when growth is most rapid. At that time its freshness is immediate. It has even been shown that this has an unanalysable value, for young animal sucklings do better from breast-feeding than when given their mothers' milk previously withdrawn from the breast.
Milk is therefore a complete food. Adults separate from it the fat as cream or butter, and the proteins as cheese, a protein that is said by nutritionists to have a higher value than that of meat. It is certainly a substitute for meat and largely taken by all agrarian peoples in its place.
Milk has to be fresh. It cannot be transported and stored as flour can. After drawing it stales rapidly, and this constitutes a problem of its supply to those who do not live in the country. In hot countries and seasons, milk is more rapidly affected than in colder ones. Where the cows are liable to tuberculosis, as is the case in western stalled cows, the milk may convey the disease. Methods to preserve milk are therefore necessary both in the west and east.
In this matter of the preservation of milk it is difficult to say whether the Hunza have the advantage of the west. The Hunza follow the Oriental custom of separating the fat and boiling it to form ghee or clarified butter. They eat the ghee with their food and they use it for cooking. As the boiling forms an intervener between the fresh butter and the consumer, their method cannot be said to be as good as ours. It is in the hot weather forced upon them, for ghee keeps better than butter.
The butter-milk or lassi that is left they drink. They also drink whole milk. They sour milk and butter-milk, which keep better when soured. They take plenty of these liquids with or without spices, though they do not get the large quantities which the Sikhs drink. The souring of milk to preserve it is thus pitted against our method of pasteurization. It is not easy to say which is the better, but the evidence is in favour of the souring, if one accepts the statement that wherever soured milk is largely used -- in the Balkans, North Africa and wide areas of Asia -- "fine physique, good health and virility are usually seen" (The Problem of Nutrition, Vol. I, League of Nations). The contribution to the fine physical development may here be the milk, which these people take much more freely and regularly than we do, and not to any particular virtue in its being soured.
On the other hand, our process of making milk safe has not won general approval.
Firstly, there is the unreliability of milk-pasteurizing plants. Recently in the House of Commons the Minister of Health announced that it was known that a high proportion of pasteurizing plants in London and elsewhere were producing improperly pasteurized milk.
At a later day came a letter to The Times from the retiring president of the National Council of Milk Recording Societies, Sir Arnold Wilson, in which he said it had been proved that there was less tuberculosis in rural areas where all milk is drunk raw than in cities where all milk is pasteurized. "Pasteurization," he added, "is supported by the whole weight of great commercial interests, who cannot dispense with it, but all available evidence suggests that its value as a safeguard against illness is small."
Moreover, there is evidence that pasteurization reduces certain healthy qualities of milk. Possibly souring does so too. I have found no scientific experiments on this point, and they would have to be very convincing to weigh against the evidence of the Balkan, North African, Arab, Hunza, Sikh, and other drinkers of it with their exceptional physique.
One quality of health which is injured or destroyed by heating, especially if prolonged, is grouped by nutritionists under the vitamin C. So the raising of the milk to 140 deg F., and keeping it there for half an hour of pasteurization undoubtedly injures it. Wilson quotes the Cattle Diseases Committee as stating that this loss will seriously affect the health of young children if uncorrected by the addition of fruit juice. As lemons and oranges are more expensive than they were, the danger has increased. Anyhow, a method which forces the need of compensating a food is faulty, and part of our "faulty feeding" is the cause of disease. The right way to avoid diseases conveyed by milk is sound human, animal, vegetable and soil nutrition, as Wilson himself concludes.
A further defect of pasteurized milk has been revealed by the work of A. L. Daniels and G. Stearns, published in the American Journal of Biological Chemistry, Volume XXXVII (1919). They found by observation that children who were put on milk that was quickly brought to the boiling point and cooled did better in increase of health and weight than children put on the half-an-hour heated pasteurized milk. The reason they gave is that pasteurization leads to the precipitation of the necessary calcium phosphate salts which can be found clinging to the wall of the container. Whether it was this and the greater loss of the qualities grouped under vitamin C, or some as yet undiscovered cause does not matter. What does matter is that pasteurization does delimit the health given by milk.
There is another curious fact. Medical officers and the Ministry of Health are both aware that the milk-drinking of the children and people of Britain is too little, and they have provided milk for school children. In most cases this milk is pasteurized. It seems that quite a considerable proportion of children have an aversion to this milk, and get nausea or vomiting, diarrhoea, headache and catarrh, when they take it. The cause, it is said, is not pasteurization, but allergy or exaggerated susceptibility in the majority of cases, and this allergy occurs in children who come from families where there is a similar aversion to milk.
It would be straining the argument to say that this might be instinct in revolt against pasteurized milk in families where instinct for a right food is yet potent, for this point has not been investigated, but I feel sure no such allergy could be found amongst the Hunza and Sikh children. Indian children whom I know never refuse milk.
Both pasteurization and souring are interveners between the fresh milk and the consumer. Of the two the evidence is in favour of souring.
We now pass on to leafy-green and root vegetables and pulses. The Hunza, with the exception of their occasional meat, are lacto-vegetarian feeders such as Hindhede and many other nutritionists, including McCarrison, put as the healthiest diet of mankind. As a general diet it may well be so, though the polar Eskimos, with an entirely opposite diet, do not yield to the lacto-vegetarians in health and physical endurance.
Vegetables therefore play a great part in Hunza feeding. The vegetables they have are mostly similar to ours, but as potatoes, now largely grown and eaten, were only introduced after the British expedition in 1892, they take no part in their traditional well-being.
These vegetables they eat raw when they can, particularly as fuel is scanty. They are fond of raw green corn, young leaves, carrots, turnips and, as it were to exaggerate their veneration for freshness, they sprout their pulses and eat them and their first green. This eating of sprouting pulse or gram is widespread in Northern India, and undoubtedly within it there is a health which there is not in the pulse itself.
Except for their use of sprouting gram, I do not know that there is any striking difference here. Probably the Hunza eat raw vegetables more freely than we do. Some of us hardly eat them at all, whereas that could not happen among the Hunza.
They have little fuel and small fires. They cook their vegetables chiefly by boiling in covered pots. But the process is more comparable to our way of steaming and cooking in their own juice. Very little water is added. When this has been used up more is added. The water in which the vegetables are cooked is drunk either with the vegetables or later. The point is that it is part of their food. It is not thrown away.
The taking of vegetable water is very obvious sense. It is surprising that we should think that there is nothing soluble in vegetables which is of value, and that they can be soaked and cooked in water without something passing from them into the water. What do pass into the water are salts. Are these salts valuable? The question can be answered by the blunt answer that they are there, and when something is in a food that can be taken, it should be taken. Over and above the fact that a food is a whole thing and should be taken as a whole, there is abundant evidence from the scientists of the loss that occurs through the throwing away of vegetable water of phosphorus, calcium, iron, iodine, sulphur etc. Quite a considerable proportion of the pharmacopoeia seems to have arisen owing to this waste. Quite a considerable number of the doctor's prescriptions and patent medicines may be due to the need to replace the salts of the food in those who suffer from the loss. The similarity of the medicines and the lost salts is too close for one not to be profoundly suspicious that the methods of cooking cause or contribute to the subsequent need of the medicines.
It is not possible to say how this habit of throwing away the water in which vegetables are cooked originated. On the surface it seems clear that it is connected with the plate versus bowl. One cannot drink liquid from a plate. One can only sop it up with bread, and that is wanting in efficiency and manners. But when the food is served in a bowl or bowls, then the fluid part of the food is not lost. I have no doubt that if British children were served their vegetables with the water in which they were cooked in bowls instead of on plates there would be an improvement in their health.
In the culture of their vegetables the Hunza's way differs from that of the west. This vital question will occupy the second part of this chapter. Here it must suffice to say that the Hunza are agrarian craftsmen, individual gardeners, as opposed to rural labourers in large-scale commercial enterprise. So the Hunza vegetables come, as we prefer vegetables to come, straight from the garden.
The Hunza do not wash their vegetables with our assiduity. Like our fondness for white bread, a cleanly appearance appeals to us probably owing to our innate dislike that any one dirty should handle our food, so we prefer our vegetables very clean. We hate to see them soiled, which may be only due to good, clean earth, but may have other origin. Staining also suggests unhealthiness of the vegetable. Consequently the protective skin of our carrots and other vegetables is apt to be rubbed off, with the result that they decay more rapidly with keeping and their flavours deteriorate. Flavour must be a healthy quality, for it is the bait of nature.
The Hunza eat the edible protective skins of their vegetables. They do not soak and wash the vegetables to the degree that loses some of the salts as we do, and of course they have no such instruments as those which give celery, for instance, its fine white appearance by getting rid of its valuable outer layers. Their sophistication is far less than ours in this matter too. They, of course, do not eat vegetables dirty as our four-footed brethren are forced to do. They clean to get rid of the soil, but they have no fetish of cleanliness induced by the fear of dangerous dirt as we have.
Meat is a rare pleasure of the Hunza, as it is with the Sikh, both of whom take it on average about every ten days. In Hunza it is scarcer than previously. Some may not get it once a month. It is more frequently eaten in winter. As with the Eskimo and others, the Hunza eat all that is edible of the carcase and not the meat only.
The reason of its scarcity as a food is that the animals are valued as dairy animals in a country where pasture and fodder are scarce. In the winter, when there is still less cattle food, there is more reason for killing.
Animal food is well-liked and figures at feasts. Schomberg describes its cooking on an occasion of ceremony. It is cut up and put into a covered pot with a mass of pounded wheat. Vegetables may also be added and red pepper for seasoning. Very little water is used, and when it is nearly finished more water and vegetables with their juices are added. The vegetables stew in their own juice, the meat and wheat in the water, a slow boiling and steaming like that of the Japanese workers, who make the pot ready in the morning before they go to work, so that the cooking is finished on their return. Schomberg says this slow cooking at ceremonial feasts continues for twenty-four hours. Nothing of course is lost in the material cooked, but such prolonged heat, even in covered pots, must destroy the factors of food, without which scurvy results. The Hunza, however, get no scurvy, because this stew is only a part of their diet and an unusual one. They have ample food to counteract the undoubted faultiness of such prolonged cooking. They also eat sun-dried meat raw, if it is fat and well-flavoured.
This heating, and particularly boiling, is the chief human sophistication of food. Its danger is that it destroys the factors grouped round vitamin C, and scurvy, either in its mild form of pallor and lassitude, or its severe form of foul flesh and bleeding, results. Before the cause of scurvy was discovered and better feeding prevented it, it was particularly fatal to soldiers on campaign and men on the high seas. It has been also argued by Mr. A. M. Ludovici in his admirable treatise, Man's Descent from the Gods, that the legend of Prometheus can be explained in no other way but by the scorbutic evils which followed the introduction of cooking. Prometheus brought fire to mankind and was punished by Zeus. For in the place of the pristine health of the people came woes and sicknesses, only to be alleviated later by Dionysus, the saviour, who taught men how to ferment grape juice, ivy juice, honey, and to eat germinated grains. That is the bare outline of this notable explanation, for it is known of course that these fermentations and sproutings, young life in fact, are particularly effective against scurvy. The remedy of Dionysus, in short, was a remedy that would be applied to-day.
Now, at feasts, at Biddulph's "public jollifications," the Hunza drink freely of their fresh home-made wine. So what they lose in the pot they gain from the bottle.
In this the Hunza are followers of Dionysus, as indeed most peasantries have been since the days of the Greek saviour, if permitted to follow their own bent. The more orthodox teetotal Moslems have, however, long frowned on the Hunza, who, nevertheless, still drink their wine. The Puritans of England, in like manner, frowned upon the English peasants who made merry with the old English ale and mead. Nowadays, the manufactured and advertised products of the brewing and distilling industries have reduced almost to nullity the elderberry, damson, gooseberry, dandelion, apple wine and other home-brews of our peasantry.
So, in the matter of balance to cooking by home-brews and sprouting gram, the Hunza undoubtedly are better off than we. Their fermented buttermilk and wines, like their corn from the field and their vegetables from the garden, are direct and lively. They bear freshness with them. They are not staled by interloping.
They therefore fill their original purpose of being valuable for their intrinsic qualities to their creators. Their value may well be that they are a balance of one art against another art, of fermentation against cooking. By fermentation a fresh, living vitality is brought in to balance a food which heat has changed and robbed. That fermented drinks do have to balance something that is lost in cooking has not been proved. It has scarcely been investigated, the question has been so fogged by prejudice. But that fermentation has played a large part in balancing some defect, that, in a cliché, it supplied a long-felt want, seems a very reasonable explanation of the regard which human beings pay to it, even when their food is particularly sound.
"The Hunza are great fruit eaters, especially of apricots and mulberries. They use apricots and mulberries in both the fresh and dry state, drying sufficient of their rich harvest of them for use throughout the autumn and winter months" (McCarrison). They eat the fruit fresh in season, cracking the stones and eating the kernels as well. Otherwise they take them, particularly sun-dried apricots, and eat them as they are or rub them in water to form a thick liquid called chamus. Dried mulberries they put into cakes as we do sultanas. They do not cook their fruits. "Fruit is really the Hunza staple. It is eaten with bread, far more so than vegetables, as it is more abundant" (Schomberg).
That this fruit is a healthy food is amply proved by the Hunza health. But, then, the Hunza health proves the health of their other foods as well, for it proves a whole. It proves that the foods or diet of the Hunza as a whole result in a human wholeness of health that is supremely excellent. The fruit, forming what Schomberg called the Hunza staple, is clearly therefore good. Everyone, however, is agreed that fresh fruit is excellent. It has a pre-eminence amongst foods which is shown by the words men attach to it -- its freshness, its lusciousness, its purity. It is the only food which the average citizen feels comes to him in the intended way, to be accepted in its unchanged natural form. It alone of the foods still preserves its pristine character and therefore is associated in his mind with something of a fresh wholesomeness like the feel of the wind when a new morning breaks. He feels, too, that there is such a direct relationship between the sun and fruit. Fruit, more obviously than other foods, ripens and colours in the sun. Sunlight is the carrier of the sun's quality. Through it that quality comes direct from the great orb of our being. It stores itself in sun-bathed food, as in a minor way electricity is stored in a battery. The eating of fruit releases the sun's quality in its most direct and least interfered-with form.
The Hunza prepare their fruit for the autumn and winter months by drying for a few days in the sun and storing it in baskets in a dry place. Does it thereby gain directly over fruit that is dried and preserved by other processes without exposure to the sun? There is no definite answer to this question. Our storing of fruit is found to lessen its value, but whether there is less loss in sun-dried apricots I have not succeeded in finding in scientific experiment. One can only answer with the old answer -- that the Hunza prove their food.
What are the relative amounts of the different foods which the Hunza eat at a meal? This, of course, is left to the individual Hunza. It is a matter of personal appetite and choice.
But, states the report of the League of Nations on The Problem of Nutrition, "it must be realised that instinct and appetite alone cannot be regarded as reliable guides in the choice of food."
That is not so with the Hunza. Their instincts and appetites cannot be looked upon as unreliable in relation to their foods. The Hunza still belong to at period when, because sophistication was very limited, instinct was reliable.
Instinct, says Alexander, has been outstripped by the speed of progress. The Hunza have in their mountain isolation kept largely free from that progress. This isolation, however, has been very different from that of the American Indian before the coming European colonists or that of the polar Eskimos, for his country is and has been one of the highways between India, Afghanistan, Russia, and China. He has had contact with many peoples. But this has not changed his instinct or culture.
The reason of this is of vital importance in the whole relation of the Hunza to physique and health. The Hunza has not had to follow others. He has, on his part, inherited from immense distances of time a form of agriculture which has claims to be the most successful in the history of man. His agriculture has not been inferior to others. Again, as opposed to American Indians and polar Eskimos, it has been one that is famous far beyond the bounds of his small valley. The valley of the River Hunza, in its way, has possessed and preserved something of the magic of the valley of the River Eurotas.
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