THE NAMES OF THINGS: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert.<i> By Susan Brind Morrow</i> .<i> Riverhead Books: 232 pp., $25.95</i>

In “Baghdad Sketches,” written in 1928, Freya Stark, writer, traveler and Arabist, confessed to being weary of “the strain of being considered a phenomenon all the time” because she was a woman traveling alone in the Muslim world, an activity the British Civil Service advised against in a formal document on the subject. “Ladies,” it stated, “are deemed to be accompanied when traveling with a European or American of the male sex.” In “The Names of Things,” Susan Brind Morrow admits that going to Egypt for her “involved three polarities, three passages between extremes.”

The first was her transition from feminine to masculine. “In Egypt, I became a man,” she writes--not like Isabelle Eberhardt who disguised herself as one, but in the sense that her condition was that of “a foreign woman as [an] honorary man in Muslim society.” The second passage was from nature to language, and she quotes Emerson, “the poet is the Namer or Language-maker. . . .” The third transition was from the city to the desert: “If the city was Um a Dunya [Mother of the World], what was the desert? The city’s negative: a blank page on which things magically appeared.” It is in the second passage that Morrow finds her most beguiling voice, at once scholarly and introspective.

“Words begin as description,” she states early on, and they form the core of her book: “The lynx is speckled like the starry sky, the nomads here say,” and “The flamingo is the hieroglyph for red. All red things: anger, blood, fire, the desert, are spelled with the flamingo.” Some “translations” of hieroglyphs appear obvious the moment they are given, such as, “The giraffe is in the verb to foresee.” Others are more mysterious: “The saddlebill stork, now rarely seen north of Khartoum, is the picture that defines the word for soul.” Ancient Egyptians called hieroglyphs medew netcher, or sacred words: “Netcher is the picture of a flag on a pole, like the flags that mark sacred places throughout the desert even now: tombs and rocks and trees. It eventually became the Coptic, hence early Christian word for God.”

Morrow’s first name, Susan, “was one of the oldest words in the language. . . . You could imagine a child rolling it off her tongue in play: susan, shusan, a common thing--as a primary hieroglyph would be. A name as common as the thing it was made to suggest, a water lily. And yet it was an important thing because it was a marker; its appearance meant the presence of something not common enough in a desert country: water, sweet water and mud.”

Morrow herself could not have come from a more distant land, another polarity. She is a descendant of the Scots who settled in Canada and was raised on the north and eastern shore of Lake Seneca, “the low rolling glacial terrain south of Ontario.” Her great-grandfather was a polymath who held degrees in medicine and law and was ribbed in the family for speaking seven dead languages.

As a child, Morrow consumed a copy of David Campbell’s “Greek Lyric Poetry,” “a collection of fragments, many of them found in Egypt scrawled on the shreds of mummy wrappings from crocodile cemeteries, on the backs of discarded tax forms, or on broken pots in trash heaps--so scarce and valuable was paper,” until it too became a relic. She began to study hieroglyphs in her second year of college, which involved “hours and hours of drawing.” That climate of concentration permeates “The Names of Things,” wherein Morrow uncovers the roots of words in hieroglyphs like one shifting sand with a finger.

It is the result of several trips to Egypt, the first as part of a topographical survey team covering an 80-mile area at the Dakhleh Oasis: “We were looking for remnants of whatever had once been alive in this desert, reduced to a polished trace of what it had been. . . .” Her job was to walk and look. “When the men saw me coming,” she recounts, “they would stop and make our morning tea in whatever shade there was, often beneath a solitary tree. This tree would invariably be a variety of acacia, a gnarled, thick-branched thorn tree which also gave them twigs for a fire. The dissolving yellow flowers of this tree leave the pungent sweet smell in the air that is the smell of southern Egypt. A picture of an acacia pod is the hieroglyph for sweet.”

At Dakhleh, the team discovered the remains of a child buried in a Roman house: “Where the arm was severed above the elbow, the frayed tendons poked out like threads of white silk. . . . I picked up the arm, the one jarringly perfect remnant of the body . . . and took it back to camp.” Beside it on her desk, she kept a horned viper floating “ribbonlike in a jar of formaldehyde . . . The letter f, fy, the sound a hissing viper makes before it strikes.”

When Morrow receives a fellowship from the Crane-Rogers Foundation, “a two-year license to wander around the eastern Sahara,” she finds herself before an exquisitely feminine dilemma: to go or to stay with a man who offered “the possibility of finally having a home. . . .” Stark wrote unsentimentally on the subject of reveling alone (“One can’t wait to be quite decrepit to enjoy life”) and distinguished between the wild soul and the domesticated (“The wild soul is perhaps conscious--as I certainly am always conscious--of the intrinsic danger of life which is hidden from the domesticated”). Morrow distinguishes between male and female impulses: “There was one side, and I identified it as male, that was eager to go into any kind of danger, and loved nothing more than to sit with a group of strangers, speaking a strange language, in the middle of nowhere. And there was another side, which I identified as female, that wanted only to stay home. . . . The latter, as the years went on, was becoming more emphatic, and more persuasive.” Stark and Eberhardt ventured into the deserts of Arabia to find the peace and solitude they, as women, might never have found at home.

Fortunately, Morrow decides to go, and the cause of her dilemma (who is Lance Morrow, the writer, we are told) joins her and asks her to marry him. The “American life” she attempts to set up for them in Giro “caved in on me” she admits, and she resumes her wanderings, accompanied by an array of idiosyncratic escorts: “I thought of Gamal and Joe, and Saad and Abdullah, and how intensely I would miss them when I was back in America. I thought of something Saad once said to me, as a joke, ‘Out here, people are your furniture, your house.’ ”

The most eccentric appears to be Gamal, “a distinguished figure in Luxor, a muhandes--a college educated man and, more important, a Hagagi, a descendant of the city’s patron saint, Abdul Hagag.” He supports a wife and four children with the income from a tobacco stand in Aswan and in his spare time works on a dictionary of the Saidi dialect, “which has a large infusion of obscure words, words that have never been written down.”

Morrow documents her travels from Aswan to the Red Sea, lives on a steamer, travels to the Sudan by ferry and is arrested at the mouth of the Wadi Um Khariga by a young soldier, ostensibly for not carrying a transit permit but actually for refusing him a ride in her Jeep to the border outpost of the secret police at Hassan a Shazli, about a hundred kilometers away. With her guide Gamal, they are finally forced to give in to the soldier’s wishes. At dawn, outside the bunker of the secret police, after having fallen asleep on a bench, Morrow summons images of her other home in the Finger Lakes: “I imagine, as I often do to orient myself, the deep strip of blue between hills of woods and fields and old red barns. . . . The smell of cold weeds and lake water snaps into my head, detaching me from where I am, and for the first time in this experience of being held captive, I am calm.”

Ten years after her first journey, Stark wrote to her publisher, “I have been lying in bed and thinking that I must give up exploring and Settle Down for ever and ever: I don’t think I really mind--it really is how and not what one sees that matters.” And how a writer learns to see is from a desert--far from conventions, the influence of peers, the security of family. Morrow’s desert really is the blank page, on which words magically appear. Her next book may well be about Settling Down.