A Journey of Discovery in the Southwest : THE PLACE WHERE SOULS ARE BORN: A Journey to the Southwest, <i> By Thomas Keneally,</i> Simon & Schuster, $22; 249 pages

This extremely interesting book is part of a travel series--commissioned by travel writer Jan Morris--that includes volumes on Africa by Aaron Latham, on Haiti by Herb Gold and an astonishingly luminous meditation on Mexico by Alice Adams.

This one, by distinguished Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, is about the Four Corners region of the Southwest: Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico.

It brings up dozens--hundreds--of questions about the nature of travel, of what it means to go to a “foreign” place, of how much our fantasies impinge on reality, of whether comparisons of landscapes really apply and, finally, about the magic of names and what they might mean to us now, right now, in our ordinary lives.

When Morris approaches Keneally to write a travel book, he considers the Sudan (too dangerous, he tells us self-effacingly), Australia (but how can you travel to your own home?) and the American Southwest. Growing up in a suburb of Sydney called Homebush (already the amazingly felicitous names are beginning to kick in) and going as a kid to the Vogue Theater, Keneally developed an early antipathy for Esther Williams and Ginger Rogers and a wistful longing for American Westerns that starred Randolph Scott and John Wayne.

Keneally tells us that those movies became part of his dream-being, his own mythology. His journey here is to somehow overtake reality--to check it out, to make the concrete somehow fit onto his boyish celluloid dreams. (But if Scott and Wayne were pretend, the mesas were always authentic, the barrancas --gorges--and the scorching deserts, real.)

Keneally takes his wife, his daughter, his cross-country skis and armloads of books. We hear of the wife and daughter in only one sentence, when they go off shopping.

In contrast, in Alice Adams’ Mexico, we see only people--lovers, friends, great companeros, embarrassingly awful tourists. Mexico looms in the background, primarily as a mirror of human, emotional sensibilities.

Keneally is after something different. He’s searching for the American Past, the real American past, the Anasazi who lived in vertiginous mesas 14,000 years ago.

But--as Keneally sweetly points out--too much space gives him the willies. His frail human form sometimes is barely up to his quest. It’s one thing to search for ghosts, he says of a long, acrophobic drive on cliff-side roads treacherously coated with black ice, but “interesting” to think of ending up as a ghost.

The author’s itinerary begins in Colorado, where he contrasts the long and elegant history of the Ute with the white ski culture of today.

He scorns the flashy downhill skier and lauds the anonymous snow groomer, who works by night and risks his life. He proceeds to Utah and gives us a dense, scholarly history of the Mormon settlement.

But what he’s really after is “the northern-most traces of the wonderful canyon-dwelling, village-making American heroes--the Anasazi. . . .” And he informs us of them, densely. The “center of the journey,” as the author sees it, is Mesa Verde and Hovenweep, sacred places where the Anasazi constructed towers that, by the placement of their windows, mark the solstices--the American Stonehenge.

When the author journeys to Arizona, he conjures up the ghost of Edward Abbey to decry the Sodom and Gomorrah of Phoenix and Tucson living, as they do, on “fossil water” from ancient times that can never be replenished. Then it is on to New Mexico, where Keneally deals conscientiously with D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, the Spanish invasion, drug runners and the fiends who thought up the atom bomb.

But what is “travel”? When Keneally talks about Craig, Colo., I can’t help but remember that that’s where our family lost the bottom half of a very expensive pair of pajamas. The red beauty of Sedona? Sitting across from my father at a picnic table, laughing at his silly jokes. D. H. Lawrence? Someone stole our suitcase at his memorial. Skiing in Colorado? My grandson, sailing down the slope, small and oh-so-cool.

In escaping his own back yard, Keneally has given us our own. What he’s done, in his endless incantations of lost and semi-lost American Indian tribes, is to take us out of the world we think we know--to “sing up the country,” as Aborigines do--to sing a world into being that lies just outside our grasp in the vast past.

Next: John Wilkes on “The Covenant of the Wild” by Stephen Budiansky (William Morrow).