"I have sometimes thought that this quality of light in the Egyptian desert is what inspired the monasticism of the early Christians and the Sufis who spoke of an intoxication of the spirit there," writes Susan Brind Morrow in The Names of Things. The author, who grew up in upstate New York, studied Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyphs at Barnard College. She worked on an archaeological survey in Egypt in 1980 and has traveled extensively in Africa and the Middle East.
Morrow writes vividly about her own intoxication with Egypt, which she calls "a knife cutting away the frozen parts of me." Her sojourns in Cairo, "the Mother of the world," and in the Egyptian desert bring out the author's masculinity as she weathers heat, sand storms, scorpions, vipers, and infections.
With beautiful prose, Morrow charts the colors of arid places, her love of discovering word cores ("the threads that run through language"), her stays at monasteries, and her delight in trading poems and stories with nomadic peoples ("it involved giving, that intangible, freeing, human thing: giving something priceless, even to a stranger, for nothing"). This is travel writing at its best — a deeply soulful work of art.