The Wheel of Health - The Secret Path of Hunza E-Book

G. T. Wrench

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

As a basis for comparison with undernourished civilized man - in a world of apparent plenty - Dr. Wrench cites the little-known race of Hunzas, inhabiting a mountainous region in the northwestern tip of India. Here, in almost absolute isolation from the modern world, the Hunzas were found to represent, by all scientific standards, the very epitome of health, vigor and general well-being, both physically and mentally. What the Hunzas eat, how they grow it, how they prepare their food . . . all these are revealed in detail in THE WHEEL OF HEALTH. In addition, Dr. Wrench explodes the theories of heredity, (with substantiations by many other recognized authorities) explaining that diseases themselves are not passed on from one generation to another, but only those weaknesses which make a person more susceptible to the disease; weaknesses which might be corrected through proper food. Not only a very readable and thought-provoking treatise on proper diet, and an urgent plea for full recognition of vitamin values, THE WHEEL OF HEALTH provides a reliable guide to all who seek a better state of well-being and longer life, through proper eating.Table of Contents:INTRODUCTIONChapter I – THE HUNZA PEOPLEChapter II – A REVOLUTION IN OUTLOOKChapter III – THE TRANSFERENCE TO EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCEChapter IV – THE STARTChapter V – CONTINUITY AND HEREDITYChapter VI – OTHER WHOLEDIET EXPERIMENTSChapter VII – FRAGMENTATIONChapter VIII – THE CAUSATION OF DISEASEChapter IX – THE HUNZA FOOD AND ITS CULTIVATIONChapter X – PROGRESS BY RECOILChapter XI – AN ENTIRE EXPERIMENT

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Chapter I – THE HUNZA PEOPLE

Chapter II – A REVOLUTION IN OUTLOOK

Chapter III – THE TRANSFERENCE TO EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE

Chapter IV – THE START

Chapter V – CONTINUITY AND HEREDITY

Chapter VI – OTHER WHOLEDIET EXPERIMENTS

Chapter VII – FRAGMENTATION

Chapter VIII – THE CAUSATION OF DISEASE

Chapter IX – THE HUNZA FOOD AND ITS CULTIVATION

Chapter X – PROGRESS BY RECOIL

Chapter XI – AN ENTIRE EXPERIMENT

THE WHEEL OF HEALTH

The Secret Path of Hunza

By

G. T. WRENCH, M.D. (Lond.)

A Man of Hunza

Originally printed in 1938

ByLONDON: THE C. W. DANIEL COMPANY LTD.

Digital edition 2016 by David De Angelis

INTRODUCTION

IT should be clearly understood that a doctor is one so saturated with people's illnesses and ailments that, if thoughtful, he is almost forced to look upon life as something heavily burdened by these defects.

I shall myself carry with me the profound impression of the first months I spent in the hospital wards and out‐patient departments many years ago. I had come from the vigorous and exuberant life of an English public school, where everything that really absorbed one's boyish interests was based on a glowing vitality and responsive health. After the penance of school hours there was plenty of time to let the muscles go games, sports, ragging, bathing, or running and walking over untilled fields. All these things were of sunlight and wind or the raw cold, which made the blood snap round its course.

Something of this life accompanies the early years of the medical student, but there is always about one the lure of the hospital work to draw one to its consuming interests. One is caught in the meshes of the problems of disease, from which one will not be able to free the mind for the rest of one's life.

For impressions of youth are those that remain. They colour all one's thought and experience, they largely select that thought and experience. And the impression of the quantity of diseases and the suffering due to them is a tremendous one. I used sometimes to walk about London with my eyes down and with the question "Why?" upon my lips until I saw pictures of the many maleficent objects of pathology upon the pavements, so vivid was the impression which the microscope and the post‐mortem room made upon me.

The effect was not one of depression; that is not the effect upon healthy youth. It was one which stimulated one like a stouter opponent than oneself at boxing. Here was truly a prodigious opponent, the problem of disease, why man is so affected.

After debating the question‐‐Why disease? Why not health?‐‐again and again with my fellow students, I slowly, before I qualified, came to a further question‐‐Why was it that as students we were always presented with sick or convalescent people for our teaching and never with the ultrahealthy? Why were we only taught disease? Why was it presumed that we knew all about health in its fullness? The teaching was wholly onesided.

Moreover, the basis of our teaching upon disease was pathology, namely, the appearance of that which is dead from disease.

We started from our knowledge of the dead, from which we interpreted the manifestations, slight or severe, of threatened death, which is disease. Through these various manifestations, which fattened our textbooks, we approached health. By the time, however, we reached real health, like that of the keen times of public school, the studies were dropped. Their human representatives, the patients, were now well, and neither we nor our educators were any longer concerned with them. We made no studies of the healthy‐‐only the sick.

Disease was the reason for our specialized existences. There was also a great abundance of it. Between its abundance and its need to ourselves its inevitability was taken for granted. Gradually, however, a question forced itself upon me more and more insistently. Had not some of this "inevitability" attached to disease come about by our profession only viewing disease from within? What would happen if we reversed the process and started by learning all we could about the healthiest people and animals whom we could discover? This question pursued me with considerable constancy, but unfortunately I was not provided with that will which is a part of what I reverence so much‐‐the genius of discovery. Those who possess it grip an idea and never let it go. They are as passionate for it to get on in the world as the mother is for her offspring; daring, as even weak animals do, to challenge hopeless odds on its behalf. After achieving a small local repute in research, all I did was to apply for scholarships, and in my applications I placed a subject of my own choice, to study the health of the healthiest people I could discover.

I did not, of course, succeed. My proposal was probably looked upon as ridiculous. To research in health was a complete reversal of the accustomed outlook, which was confined by the nature of the profession to different aspects of disease. For to the profession disease is the base and substance of its structure and health just the top of the pyramid, where it itself comes to an end. To propose reversing this was like asking one to stand on one's head to get the right point of view.

At any rate my applications came to nothing, though I was offered work upon the accepted lines. In this I had not the necessary faith, so I gave up research and went into practice. I remained interested in very healthy people and read what I could about them, but the work imposed by the war and by practice in the following years withheld me from anything more than an academic interest in the old question‐‐Health; why not?

It was not until two years ago, when I had more leisure, that a vivid sentence in the writings of Sir Robert McCarrison thawed my frozen hope. The sentence was: "These people are unsurpassed by any Indian race in perfection of physique; they are long lived, vigorous in youth and age, capable of great endurance and enjoy a remarkable freedom from disease in general." Further study of his writings was very encouraging. Here was a research worker who researched in health and healthy people; in fact, he presented to himself health as a problem, and produced answers to it, in some such words as the following: "Here is a people of unsurpassed health and physique, and here are researches into the reasons thereof."

In this way it will be seen we come as researchers straight to health without intervention, and to health in the full dictionary sense of the word of wholeness, namely, sound physique of every organ of the body without exceptions and freedom from disease. This is the knowledge which we all want to know. We want to know what is full health, whether the tremendous part illness and ailments play in modern civilized countries is really necessary and, if not, upon what primarily does health depend. We can ourselves attain to health‐‐or at least with our modern skill in investigation we should be able to do so‐‐if this full health exists in any part of our Empire to‐day. Ate shall at least learn more about how to be healthy ourselves and how to bring healthy children into the world by studying successful human examples than we can by any other way.

By studying the wings of birds in flight we have made our machines carry us through the air. By studying one of the healthiest peoples of the world we might so improve our methods of health as to become a really healthy people ourselves. A research in health is really promising. Well, here is one. Let us see if the promise is fulfilled.

Chapter I – THE HUNZA PEOPLE

WHERE India meets Afghanistan and the Chinese Empire and is closest to the Soviet Republics, there, amidst a congress of great mountains, is the Native State of Hunza.

If one looks at a map of this part of the world with the mountain ranges shown by strongly‐marked lines, they are seen to sweep towards each other to meet to the north of, at and to the south of the cleft of the Hunza valley.

A map in Mrs. Visser‐Hoofts' Among the Kara‐Korum Glaciers (1926) is of this kind. To the north is the mighty wall of the Tien‐shan, coming from Mongolia, as the northern border of the Chinese Turkestan, to merge itself with the Pamir in the west, to the north of Hunza. South of the Tien‐shan, forming the southern boundary of Turkestan and separating it from Tibet, is the curved line of the Kwen‐lun, passing from east to west also to meet the line of the Pamir.

Yet further south, passing from west to east, is the straight line of the Hindu‐Kush. From the east, passing west and meeting the Hindu‐Kush at the cleft of Hunza, is the Kara‐Korum range. Sweeping up from the southeast is the main Himalaya, ending in the lesser ranges of Chitral and Afghanistan to the south of Hunza.

In the congress of these huge ranges is to be found the greatest folding of the earth's surface, and where the folding is actually greatest, that is between the Hindu‐Kush to the west and the Kara‐Korum to the east, there, in a profound cleft, between walls of ten to fifteen thousand feet in height, lies the habitable part of Hunza.

Could any place be less like England, or London, which now harbours a quarter of England's population? Is any place less likely to give us guidance in matters of health than this cleft between its prodigious unscaled mountain walls?

That seems a reasonable enough doubt. Certainly there are stupendous superficial differences. Yet, the beautiful and highly cultivated sunny seven miles, which is the heart of Hunza, may, by its very remoteness, have sheltered primary truths of health which our civilisation forgotten.

Fortunately many people have seen the Hunza folk, for their valley is the highway to the 15,600 feet wall which divides India from China and is called the Mintaka Pass. The pass is itself only some ten miles from the extreme eastern corner of Afghanistan. Moreover, a good walker, starting early in the day, can pass over it and reach Kizil Robat, which is the most south‐eastern post of Bolshevist Asia. So a lot of people have passed along this cleft, and no doubt in the past a lot more, in big invading troops, would like to have done so. Actually, more than a thousand years ago an army of ten thousand Chinese did cross the Darkot Pass (15,400 feet) into the neighbouring valley of Yasin and occupied the Gilgit district, but that proved to be an inimitable feat. With this exception, these clefts have only been traversed by small groups of men. In modern times most of the European explorers, missionaries, and officials, on their way from India to Central Asia, take the Hunza route.

Europeans do not live in Hunza. In transit they spend a few days in Baltit, the capital of Stanza, collecting coolies for their further journey and enjoying the hospitality of its famous ruler, Mir Mohammed Nazim Khan.

So there is no account of Hunza by a resident. Nevertheless, many travellers have left their impressions of Hunza, and the officials of the Gilgit Agency to which Hunza is now attached have to visit the valley on their official rounds. Hence a good deal is known about the Hunza people, but superficially rather than intimately.

They are still a people peculiarly themselves. They have preserved their remoteness from the ways and habits of the modern world, and with it those methods of life which contribute or cause the excellent physique and bodily health which is theirs.

The travellers and officials with one voice bear testimony to the Hunzas' physique. They find these people not only fearless, good‐tempered and cheerful, but also as possessing a marvellous agility and endurance.

For example, that illustrious traveller and savant, Sir Aurel Stein, when on the way to the "Sand‐buried Ruins of Khotan" (1903), was amazed on the morning of June 25th to see a returning messenger who had been sent by the Mir to the political Munshi of Tashkurghan to prepare him for Stein's impending arrival. The messenger had started on the 18th. It was just seven complete days between his start and his return, and in that time he had travelled two hundred and eighty miles on foot, speeding along a track mostly two to four feet wide, sometimes only supported on stakes let into the cliffwall, and twice crossing the Mintaka Pass, which is the height of Mont Blanc. The messenger was quite fresh and undisturbed, and did not consider that what he had done was unusual.

Nor was it, not even its speed. To pass along mountain tracks, of course, is the only way the people can get out of their strip of green country between river and mountain. But that does not make their going up and down and across the faces of precipices easy‐going. Yet "it is quite a usual thing for a Hunza man to walk the sixty miles to Gilgit at one stretch, do his business and return direct," says Colonel R. C. F. Schomberg, who for eight years had occasion to visit the Gilgit Agency and saw much of the Hunza.

They are a peculiar people, almost like the mountain ibex which they hunt, in the ease of their gait. When they traverse these huge distances they have such a quick, light way of passing over the ground that they can be detected at great distances from other peoples on a mountain track. "How can you tell at such a distance that those laden coolies are Hunza?" asked Schomberg of his native companions. "By the way they walk," was the reply.

Indeed, interpolated in the fascinating narrative of Schomberg's travels Between the Oxus and the Indus (1905) one finds a constant paean of the physique and excellence of the Hunza. This is the more interesting, for Schomberg visited a number of other populated valleys of the Gilgit Agency, and, though mountainous conditions and climate were the same, the people did not compare, on the whole, in physique and quality with the Hunza.

Some of the peoples, however, Schomberg found, approached but did not reach the Hunza. He set out from Gilgit and passed through the fief of Punyal. "The Punyalis," he writes, "are splendid climbers," and then comes a little bit of the paean, "second only to the men of Hunza."

Punyal is the first bit of country to the west, going from Gilgit, up the valley of the Gilgit river, with the mountains of Hunza on the right. Some sixty miles further westwards is Chizr, on the borders of Chitral. The people of Ghizr are lazy. They do not store food carefully for the winter, and at the end of the winter are usually starving. Schomberg's two Hunza attendants mocked at the hovels in which the men of Ghizr lived. The owners of the hovels replied meekly that they knew their houses were squalid and miserable, but they could not be troubled to build new ones. The general assent with which the bystanders received this explanation showed how ingrained this laziness of character was in the Ghizr people. Now, the Hunza are a most industrious people. And yet Hunza and Ghizri are not far apart, and both live within similar surroundings.

Two valleys, like the Hunza in being made by rivers flowing from the Kara‐Korum glaciers south to the Gilgit river, lie to the west of Hunza. The first is Ishkoman, the second Yasin. Schomberg visited both. The Yasinis had fine lands and ample crops, and were, moreover, of fine physique, though falling short of the folk of Hunza and Punyal. Yet the Ishkomanis, whose valley is between that of the Yasinis and that of the Hunza, though living under apparently like conditions to their neighbours, were poor, undersized, undernourished creatures. There was plenty of land and water, but the Ishkomanis were too indolent to cultivate it with thoroughness, and the possibility of bad harvests was not enough to overcome their sloth. They had a number of yaks, but they were too lazy to load them or to ride them or to collect their valuable hair or even to milk them. They had no masons or carpenters or craftsmen in their country.

Many of them showed signs of disease. "The more I saw of the Ishkomanis, the more I was struck by their degeneracy; they were poor in physique and lacking in brains; a strange type of mountaineer!" (Schomberg).

Why they were so poor a type with such fine people on the other side of the eastern wall of their valley their visitor does not say. But it is so. These poor Ishkomanis, who danced to entertain their guests, looked like "newly‐hatched chickens," as a Hunza spectator scornfully remarked, whereas the Hunza dance is altogether wonderful, according to travellers.

The difference of the Ishkomanis and the Hunza cannot be due to their being on different sides of their twenty‐thousand feet wall. In this relation the two peoples are not north and south, but west and east. Both valleys run to the south from the main range, so the similarity of their situation remains.

From the valley where "the people represent as low a type of humanity as any in north‐west India" Schomberg passed from the south into the valley of the Hunza river. On the way he had to pass through the territory of one more people, the Nagiris of the Native State of Nagir, situated on the southern side of the Hunza river valley, but with a capital a little removed in a branch valley joining the main valley from the east.

The Nagiris, though facing the people of Hunza, are not of their physical class. By all travellers who write of them this is noted. They are of good physique in the main, but they fail to reach the supreme excellence and energy of the Hunza, which makes so light of the stern conditions in which both live.

It is recorded that in all the little wars that arose between these neighbours, the Hunza, though less numerous, have invariably won. Even in games it is the same. Bruce, in 1894, organised various sports and games between Hunza and Nagiris. The Hunza men won every event. As coolies for mountaineering expeditions the Hunza have greatly the superior reputation. They are superb mountaineers and unequalled slab climbers, whereas the Nagiris have no such superlative repute. Nor have the Nagiris the brightness and good humourof the Hunza; they are more sedate and morose. The Nagiris give as a reason for this difference that in winter, when the sun is in the south, they on the south side of the valley are in the shadow of the great mountains, whereas the Hunza on the northern side enjoy the sun. It is true that, owing to a western bend to the river, the Hunza do get more sun, but this extra sun would not cover the Hunza superiority to the men of Ghizr and many others who also live on the northern side of their west to east valleys. Still, this is a difference which we, in a British winter, can appreciate.

The Nagiris are slovenly and have unclean habits, because of which, say the Hunza, they also have such swarms of flies. They are content with squalid houses and with indolent workmanship. "The people of Nagir," writes Schomberg, "are poor husbandmen, believing rather in the kindness of Providence than in hard work, and their lovely fertile country owes but little to its owners."

Passing Nagir, Hunza is reached. It is in the main a stretch of intense cultivation, extending some seven to eight miles along the northern bank of the Hunza river. It is a place of brilliant beauty. Facing it to the south is the great white cloud of Rakaposhi, 25,550 feet high, rising some 18,000 feet above the valley itself and dominating it, though on a vaster scale, as Mont Blanc dominates the valley of Chamonix. Between the valley and the snows are huge barren precipices, except where the slopes allow of terraced vegetation. These terraces in summer are bands of brilliant green or golden corn from the river bank almost up to the verge of the snows. In the autumn the green of the abundant fruit trees change to scarlet and gold and vermilion and even bright pink, so that Mr. Skrine in Chinese Central Asia (1926), on his way through Hunza, wonders that no artist has made his name "world‐famous" by transferring to his canvas something of the incomparable brilliancy of the multi‐coloured valley, with its tremendous frame of grim, rocky malls, above which are the immeasurable snows. Here dwell the Hunza, whose numbers Major Biddulph in Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh (1880) roughly calculated as 6,ooo people, but who have, since the census was instituted about 1911, it seems increased, to their detriment, to 14,000.

Their occupation has been and is agricultural, but to this they added, before coming under the British suzerainty, a little banditry. They were not cruel; indeed, they seem to have regarded the looting of fat Turkis on their way to Mecca or the Khergiz of the Pamirs in part as a sport. But it was a sport that often ended in failure and a long journey home without food.

As brigands they showed their wonderful powers of endurance, travelling for miles along cruel precipices and crossing turbulent rivers at a speed none other could accomplish. They were, of course, much feared, and in 1891 Colonel Durand led an expedition to stop their practices. It seems that they were not unwilling to stop.

Durand The Making of a Frontier (1894), discovered that they did not care to neglect their fields for banditry.

Agriculture was their real desire, and true agriculturists are not military. "As brigands," says Durand, "they appear to have acted always on the orders of their chief, and the admirable culture of their ground, the immense and persistent labour spent on their irrigation channels, and on the retaining walls of their terraced fields," showed him clearly where their interests as a people lay.

Since brigandage has had to be abandoned as an extra source of income by the chiefs, its place has been taken by the profit received from the hire of porterage by travellers and mountaineers. The Hunza are quite exceptional porters. All mountaineers are agreed on this point. Two quotations from Volume 71 (1928) of the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society are examples of the general testimony.

General Bruce, of Mount Everest fame, recounted in 1928 at the Royal Geographical Society, how, in 1894, he had to call up the one‐time Hunza Rifles; how they left their flocks away up in the mountains, collected their kit, and "went to Gilgit in one march of sixty‐five miles of very bad country indeed. . . . I found the Hunza people most charming and perfectly companionable. They are as active as any people can possibly be . . . and as slab climbers nobody in the world can beat the Hunza men. For hard work in the mountains, if we had a trained body, they would not prove inferior to our best Sherpa porters," who have so nobly assisted our Everest climbers almost to the top of the world, but not quite.

The second testimony is that of Captain C. Y. Morris, who explored the Hunza side valleys and glaciers in 1927. "These men were with us for just on two months," he said at the same meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in 1928. "During this time they were continuously on the move and over what is probably some of the worst country in the world for laden men. Always ready to turn their hand to anything, they were, I think, the most cheerful and willing set of men with whom I have ever travelled. . . . At the worse part of all we halted in order to help the porters across. They disdained our proffered assistance, however, and came over, climbing like cats, and with never a murmur at the hardships of this day's work."

If there is anything to try the nerves in these parts and give the equivalent of neurasthenia, it must be the danger and the exhausting work of porterage. Other porters give up, as the readers of the tales of recent expeditions, such as that which conquered Nanda Devi, know. Not so the Hunza. They know neither the fear nor the weariness which spoils the will.

Far from being nervous or morose, nearly every visitor testifies to their freedom from quarrels and exceptional cheerfulness. This cheerfulness, one notes, seems to be a characteristic of the little Tibetans of Baltistan, Tibetans, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, all of whom, we shall see, follow certain similar principles of agriculture.

The Hunza originally were brought into contact with the British power owing to their interference with trade, which was by the same British converted from a hindrance to an assistance. But no people, of course, can exist upon banditry or porterage. "Far from being mere robber tribes," wrote Biddulph in 1880, of the Hunza, "they are settled agricultural communities."

Here also, as might be expected, they excel. They are admirable cultivators, far famed as such and "conspicuously ahead of all their neighbours in brain and sinew," stated Schomberg. Their big irrigation conduit, the Berber, is "famous everywhere in Central Asia."

They are also what really follows from being capable agriculturists, namely, good craftsmen. Amongst the peoples of the Agency not only are they "as tillers of the soil quite in a class apart," writes Schomberg, "they alone‐‐and this always strikes me as truly remarkable‐‐are good craftsmen. As carpenters and masons, as gunsmiths, ironworkers, or even as goldsmiths, as engineers for roads, bridges or canals, the Hunza men are outstanding."

Lastly, as Mr. C. P. Skrine notes in Chinese Central Asia (1926), as dancers "they are incomparably finer than the well‐known Cuttack dancing of the North‐west Frontier."

As to food, owing to their excellent agriculture they have enough to eat, except the few weeks preceding the summer harvest. They have wheaten bread, barley and millet, a variety of vegetables and fruits. They have milk, buttermilk, clarified butter, and curd‐cheese. They have occasional meat. They rarely have any fish or game. They take wine, mostly about the time of Christmas. They used to make spirits, but that has been forbidden.

It is important to note, as has been already stated, that since the suzerainty of the British the population has, it seems, increased, a common phenomenon when such a people comes in contact with the west. There is, therefore, less food for them than in the past, and Colonel D. L. Lorimer, who was Political Agent at Gilgit 1920‐4, and revisited the Hunza and lived amongst them at Aliabad, 1933‐4, four miles from the capital, Baltit, told me that not only did they‐seem smaller to him at his second visit, but that the children appeared

undernourished for the weeks preceding the first summer harvests half way through June; and, moreover, that the children suffered at that time of year from impetigo, or sores of the skin, all of which vanished when the more abundant food came. The supply of land and water is not to‐day sufficient for the people at the preharvest period, the climate of Hunza being arid.

The most conspicuous feature of the Hunza diet is the large quantity of fruit they eat, fresh in the summer and at other times dried, either alone or in wheatencakes. There is so much fruit in Hunza that "even the animals," said Durand, "take the fruit diet, and you see donkeys, cows and goats eating the fallen mulberries.

The very dogs feed on them, and our foxterriers took to the fruit regimen most kindly and became quite connoisseurs."

The daily eating is given by Schomberg as: nothing before going out in the early morning to the fields; after two or three hours of work, bread, pulses and vegetables with milk; at midday, fresh fruit or dried apricots kneaded with water; in the evening these same foods, with meat on rare occasions.

This food seems simple and primitive. It will be found, on amplification, that it is neither simple nor is it primitive in the sense of being crude, and the full understanding of it will not be reached until almost the last pages of this book.

The Hunza are Moslems, but they do not confine their women, who go about freely. Nor do they refrain from wine. On the contrary, they grow good grapes and enjoy homemade wine. They, and the people of Punyal, indeed, shock the more orthodox Moslems in those parts by their fondness for public jollifications. The Mir, or ruler, treats his visitors to his home‐brew and they find it sound and comforting. Bruce suggested to his fellow‐geographers that this wine is one of the causes of the great cheeriness of the Hunza.Their life is one of the open air, of course, for men, women and children work in the fields. But they have to face the cold and storms of winter. The Hunza houses are often three storeys high and are better built and more light and airy than elsewhere in the Gilgit Agency. Moreover, owing to a shortage of fuel or a liking for better air, the Hunza, though they spend much time indoors during the stormy time of winter, do not fill the main living‐room of the house with the dense smoky atmosphere which Durand speaks of as horrible in the houses of the Hindu‐Kush generally in mid‐winter.

As regards the disposal of human excrete, the Hunza here, as in other matters of great importance, follow the same principles as the Tibetans and Chinese. They pass their excrete into hidden privies, as do their Tibetan neighbours in Baltistan. From time to time these privies are opened and the material is added to the compost, which they use for the manuring of the soil.

Their water they keep in closed, separate cisterns, so that their animals cannot drink from them. Open water tanks are provided for their beasts.

So the Hunza houses are better than their neighbours, their water is separate and protected, and their sanitation has the time‐honoured approval of the Far East. Here, in these matters of ventilation, water‐supply, and sanitation, they also show superiority; but, especially in winter ventilation, not such as can well account for the superiority of their physique. Something these better ways may well contribute, but not enough to give a full and sufficient reason.

Schomberg, therefore, asks the question: "Can it be race?" He gives many pages to answering the question.

As the first settlement of Nagir was from Hunza, the Hunza and Nagiris have been classed as one race. But the first settlement was many centuries ago, and since then many Kashmiris have entered Nagir and overwhelmed the earlier settlers. But they were kept out of Hunza. About the only remnant of relationship between the two peoples is that they both speak the Burushaski tongue. So do some people in Yasin and Punyal. There has been mixture. This is even seen in Hunza. But the majority of the Hunza in Hunza are distinguished by their fair skins, and they themselves scoff at being of the same blood as the smaller, dark Nagiris.

"Still less," says Schomberg, "are the Hunza folk of the same stock as those of the rest of the Indus valley. It is certainly difficult to understand how anyone, after having dealings with the Hunza people, could imagine that they had anything in common with their neighbours of Nagir, still less with the inhabitants of Gilgit or the Indus valley." Their very language is a peculiar and difficult tongue, Burushaski, only spoken in Hunza and parts of Nagir, and a little in Punyal, whose men Schomberg, as already quoted, places as second to the Hunza. Sir Aurel Stein says something very significant about Burushaski in Sand‐buried Ruins of Khotan (1906). It has "no‐apparent connection with either the Indian or the Iranian family of languages, and seems an erratic block left here by some bygone wave of conquest." How the small race which speaks the language of Hunza has come to occupy these valleys will perhaps never be cleared up by historical evidence. But its preservation between the Dards on the south and the Iranians and Turki tribes on the north is clearly due to the isolated position of the country. The Hunza people become now mysterious, as well as men of unequalled physique and health. They are something very old, an erratic block of an ancient world, still perhaps with its peculiar knowledge and traditions, and preserved in that profound cleft of theirs from the decay of time. The ruling families of Hunza people make a claim to being descended from the soldiers of Alexander or even from Alexander himself, much as English families like to say their ancestors came over with the Conqueror. High‐flown though this may seem, still there is one thing a little strange.

The Hunza, as Moslems, will not be photographed stripped. That is an unforgivable affront. Yet there is one such photo extant. It shows a man of medium height, broad shoulders, full chest, wide costar arch, narrow waist, small belly and strong legs. If one looks at this photo and then at the Aeginetan Scultpures lodged in the Glyptothek of Munich, one sees rare men of peculiar deep‐chested breathing, feeding efficiency and powerful motility. Most strangely and unexpectedly these sculptured men and the photoed Hunza appear the same. The photo might be the statues and the statues the photo. Schomberg calls this claim of descent from the great Conqueror fantastic, and so it is, and any speculation with present knowledge upon a possible marvellous nest of purebred preservation of the classic Greek is equally fantastic. All one can say is that this people of Hunza, so unique amongst peoples, is no less unique in its racial characters. Everything suggests that in its remoteness it may preserve from the distant past things that the modern world has forgotten and does not any longer understand. And amongst those things are perfect physique and health.

Chapter II – A REVOLUTION IN OUTLOOK

ROBERT MCCARRISON, now Major‐General Sir Robert McCarrison, qualified as a medical practitioner atQueen's University, Belfast, in 1900. He entered the Indian Medical Service and sailed for India on his twentythird