232 Diet and Health
so large an area had to be carried across the face of one of these precipices. The Alps
contain no Wasserleitung which for volume and boldness of position can be compared to
the Hunza canal. It is a wonderful work for such toolless people as the Hunzakats to
have accomplished, and it must have been done many centuries ago and maintained
ever since, for it is the life-blood of the valley.Thus it can be seen that the Hunza appear to form a direct link between the present
day and that ‘remote past’ in which agriculture reached such a ‘remarkable develop-
ment’. They are a people perhaps as ancient as the Incas, but who, unlike the Incas,
have survived, and in their survival have preserved their ancient lore, and in the pres-
ervation of that lore have preserved the wholeness of their health and that of their
crops and livestock, which Dr Wrench tells us is on a par with their own.
The blight which Western civilization usually casts on such people, has so far
escaped them. Whether it will continue to do so is another matter. Since they have
come under British suzerainty their population has increased from about six thou-
sand to fourteen thousand, and this has resulted in a shortage of food in the pre-
harvest period:
Colonel D. L. Lorimer, who was Political Agent at Gilgit, 1920–4, and revisited the
Hunza and lived amongst them at Alibad, 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 under-nourished for the weeks preceding the first summer harvests
half-way through June; and, moreover, that the children suffered at that time of the year
from impetigo, or sores of the skin, all of which vanished when the more abundant food
came.A sign, incidentally, that it is not by virtue of their race, or habitat, or housing, that
they are normally immune from bodily ailments.
We will now go from Latitude 37 to the northern and Arctic regions: from the
lacto-vegetarian diet of the Hunza to the carcass diet of the islanders of Faroe,
Iceland and Greenland. Early records of these peoples show them to have been
every whit as healthy as the Hunza, yet these people are, or were, almost entirely
carnivorous.
These Danish possessions are three isolated lands from which no Western civilized per-
son would expect to glean wisdom. But, as we have already seen in the case of food and
health, isolation locks up the most valuable secrets. The peoples of these three lands,
living either near or actually within the Arctic Circle, offer in three degrees, from Faroe
to Greenland, an increasingly animal-fish-bird diet. It must not be called a meat diet;
that is inaccurate as will be seen. It was largely a diet from the sea, and with the great
health of the sea, a ‘soil’ outside the realms of terrestrial man.
The diet of the Faroe Islanders, when they were more isolated than now, was given
in a book published by the Edinburgh Cabinet Library in 1840. It was mainly a whole-
carcass diet of animal, bird and fish. The islanders ate not merely meat, but everything