BOOK REVIEW : Journey of Discovery Yields Magical Verse : JOURNEY TO THE VANISHED CITY: The Search for a Lost Tribe of Israel <i> by Tudor Parfitt</i> St. Martins: $22.95, 288 pages

“At noon,” writes Tudor Parfitt in “Journey to a Vanished City,” “the road from Nirvana to Nobody was like a reel-to-reel tape looped insecurely over the hills.”

*

“Nirvana” and “Nobody” are place names, not metaphysical states of mind, and Parfitt’s book can be regarded as an elevated and strangely enchanting travelogue. But what Parfitt claims to be seeking is nothing less than the secret of the Lemba of Southern Africa, who profess to be a Jewish tribe descended from King Solomon, and who are regarded by other tribes as sorcerers and magicians of special power. As Parfitt puts it, he is taking us on “a journey into a myth.”

“Right ho!” says a Lemba elder named Phophi, who neatly sums up the elaborate and unlikely tribal history that Parfitt seeks to confirm or deny. “ This is the origin of the Lemba. This is how we came to be sojourning in this wretched land of the Gentiles. Solomon sent his ships to get gold from Ophir, that is Zimbabwe. Some of the Jews who went on those boats stayed in Africa. . . . Right ho! What else do you need to know?”

What else, indeed! Parfitt goes on to probe the legend and lore of the Lemba, the mysterious artifacts and ruins that suggest a lost civilization, the tribal practices that seem to resemble Judaism: circumcision, food taboos, the use of the word “amen” in tribal prayer. And he ponders other, rather less Judaic rituals of the Lemba, such as the rumored custom that requires a male member of the tribe to slit the throat of a dying fellow tribesman.

“ No, no and no ,” insists Phophi in repudiation of the throat-cutting canard. “Jews do not butcher their kinsmen.”

Are the Lemba actually Jewish? Parfitt offers an intriguing and surprising answer at the very end of his book.

Most of the time, though, Parfitt appears to be less interested in religious studies than in the human landscape of contemporary Africa. And his book is at its most engaging--and most illuminating--when Parfitt contemplates the sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes comical manifestations of the clash between black and white, between the First World and the Third World.

Parfitt, a lecturer in Jewish studies at the University of London, has already written about the Jews of Ethiopia--the so-called Falashas--in “The Thirteenth Gate,” and he is well-versed in the rich and exotic traditions that link Africa with King Solomon and the Ark of the Covenant.

Parfitt jokes about maintaining a proper scientific attitude toward the subject of his new study, but he seems to revel in confronting people with their own foolishness. Now and then, he resorts to a kind of sly burlesque.

“We were in UK for the old lady’s eightieth,” a South African of English descent tells Parfitt.

“You don’t look eighty,” says Parfitt to the man’s wife.

“Not her, you stupid bugger, she’s only sixty-nine,” says the Englishman. “I mean the Queen Mum.”

Such incidental encounters are the most entertaining aspect of “Journey.” As he searches for the secret wisdom of the Lemba, Parfitt meets a dying but faintly magical tribal chief; a pair of Rain Queens, present and future; an old gold prospector who actually makes his living by walking the railroad lines of Zimbabwe in search of terrorist land mines, and an assortment of cops and commissars, scam artists and special pleaders. Each encounter is an opportunity for Parfitt to point out, elegantly but with an unmistakable edge, some of the ironies of life in contemporary Africa.

For example, he is welcomed by an embittered white librarian in South Africa who warns him that inquiries into the Jewish origin of the Lemba may be regarded as a dangerous example of “diffusionism,” a thought-crime that consists of attributing some aspect of African culture to outside influence.

“There are American colleges,” she says darkly, “where you get fired if you even question the Afrocentric view of history.”

An equal measure of bitterness can be found in a Lemba villager in Zimbabwe who regards the history of the white enterprise in Africa with a kind of weary bemusement: “You know, after a hundred years of the white man, the only difference it has made here is that we know the Bible and we have aluminum pots for cooking,” he says. “They had a world for themselves. We had our world.”

The words of the villager contain a clue to the mysterious origins of the Lemba. Out of deference to “The Crying Game” standard of conduct for reviewers, I will not give away the ending of Parfitt’s quest.

But the Lemba mystery is not the most intriguing element in “Journey.”

At its best moments, Tudor Parfitt’s book resembles a novel by Graham Greene, not only in its exotic settings and characters but in its insight and wisdom too.