SAND SCRIPT

By Pico Iyer

Once upon a time, animals and words were intimate: in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, the letter m was an eagle owl, the letter a a white Egyptian vulture. Such curious jewels pop up on every page of Susan Brind Morrow's first book, The Names of Things (Riverhead; 232 pages; $25.95). Taking herself into the Egyptian desert, Morrow works as a kind of archaeologist of the living world, digging for meanings as she watches cranes, catches "sundogs" and learns that the saddle-bill stork in the first hieroglyphs represented the soul. Language, she recalls, quoting Emerson, is "a sort of tomb of the Muses... Language is fossil poetry."

Trained as a classicist, Morrow first went to dig up axheads in the Western Desert in 1980. Returning to her home in upstate New York for Christmas, she woke up one morning to hear that her 20-year-old brother had died in a car crash (as their sister had before him). Making her way back to the ancient world, as if in response, she soon found herself being passed over the heads of a crowd in Aswan and onto a ferry where men "reclined in circles smoking honey-soaked tobacco in water pipes," their eyes the "shades of lavender or mint green."

She takes us on that ferry to Sudan, on soldier-haunted drives around the desert and to a soothsayer's home in Cairo. Yet the heart of her book is an inner quest as she tries to piece together the fragments of her life and loves by observing the natural wonders around her. She learns how stars and flowers were defined with the same Coptic words, and exchanges poems with wise, sand-hardened guides. Even when she goes fishing, she comes upon the "green unicorn fish," which uses its buckteeth to eat coral, and the "apricot-yellow" boxfish, which resembles "a lovely joke, a gift for a friend." The northern side of the Ras Benas peninsula of the Red Sea, she writes, is "a treasure trove of odd objects from around the world." In that regard, it is a perfect mirror of her book.

--By Pico Iyer