On the Trail of a Horse : SACRED HORSES: Memoirs of a Turkmen Cowboy, <i> By Jonathan Evan Maslow (Random House: $24; 416 pp.)</i>

There is a central dilemma at the heart of Jonathan Evan Maslow’s intriguing new book, “Sacred Horses: Memoirs of a Turkmen Cowboy,” an account of two trips to Turkmenistan, in Central Asia, where the author hoped to ride a fabled Akhal-Teke purebred horse across the Kara Kum Desert. When a writer sets out on a quest, what does he write about if the object of it eludes him? That’s the problem Maslow encounters, and the solution he offers leaves something to be desired.

Maslow, a journalist and a naturalist, starts out his journey by claiming an affection for horses that dates back to his childhood. He speaks of it as a “powerful, mystical attraction” that he never got over. So possessed did he become that after graduating from college he took a job at a Vermont farm where thoroughbreds were stabled, and he glimpsed there what he calls the romantic notion underlying all of horsemanship--”that a human and animal can work together as a team, blending mind and muscle in a perfectable union.”

The romance never really left him. When he turned 40, divorced and childless, he hatched a dreamy plan to tackle the Eurasian steppes on horseback, failing to realize how difficult it might be. Though he understood that the steppes are a hostile environment almost unparalleled on earth, with brutal temperatures in summer and icy winters when big winds scour a landscape virtually absent of trees, he remained undeterred.

In this adverse climate, Maslow notes, the sturdy Akhal-Teke breed once flourished. Equus caballus was probably first domesticated in Central Asia, in fact. Evidence exists to show that herdsmen kept mares for food and milk by the third millennium B.C., and also mated them to stallions in season. After the herdsman had invented harnesses and stiff saddles, horses became an integral part of their nomadic lives. “Their country is the back of their horse,” Herodotus said of the Scythians who, when mounted, were the fiercest warriors of the ancient world.

Maslow’s skill at digging up such historical material and conveying it in a fresh and agreeable way is one of the treats that “Sacred Horses” provides. He goes on to tell us that the horses, all light-cavalry types, combined many famous breeds, but that they finally came to be known as Turkomans after the Turkoman tribe, who occupied a barren region to the extreme southwest--Turkmenistan on the maps of the old Soviet Republic. The horses, further refined as Akhal-Tekes, are still bred there now, having lasted through the Stalin era when they were ground up and stuffed into sausage casings to feed the immigrants from Russia and elsewhere who were repopulating Ashkhabad in 1948, after a devastating earthquake.

The Akhal-Tekes, then, are survivors, and Maslow celebrates their toughness, their racing ability--they may be the progenitors of all modern racehorses--and their astonishing endurance. In marathons, he says, they have crossed 225 miles of the Kara Kum in just three days, without any water. The horses become for him what the snow leopard was to Peter Mathiessen--a potent symbol of many things, including renewal--but as he pursues them into Turkmenistan, his narrative falters.

Maslow sets off for the steppes in a spirit of optimism. He has learned some Russian and taken riding lessons, but he seems curiously unprepared for the many nuisances a traveler might meet in what was then, in 1991, still the Soviet Union. He isn’t the most relaxed sort of fellow, either. Arriving in Ashkhabad as a “citizen diplomat” with a cultural exchange group, he’s put off by the poverty, dust and rubble of that beleaguered city and insults his host family by sleeping through a special banquet in his honor.

Although he tries to play the incident for comic effect, as he does his clashes with petty bureaucrats and KGV agents, the humor has an unsympathetic, ugly-American edge to it. The director of the Turkmen Friendship Society, for instance, is “Korean. Striped tie, playboy sunglasses, big mole, small white fangs.” Maslow bumps into “oafs,” “eunuchs,” and “old goats,” and pokes fun at the fractured English he hears. A helpful professor is described as “an inoffensive toad of a man,” while a bride-to-be is “not pretty to look at, but ample where it counted.”

The list goes on. In Maslow’s view, the Turkmen people are always slurping up vodka and chewing through platters of food. Later, in the town of Repetek, he complains about having to tip a rude railroad agent, apparently oblivious of the fact that little bribes are the true currency in every impoverished country. “There was no justification for it,” he says. “I might more logically have punched him in the mouth.”

What saves Sacred Horses from sinking altogether is a more serious and engaging side of Maslow that manifests itself in arresting discussions of Soviet politics, the origins of nomadism, or the intricacies of the Kara Kum. He writes glowingly about the desert and also about some Akhal-Tekes he visits at a racetrack stable in Ashkhabad. They have lustrous, doe-soft coats whose “iridescence could only be compared to a beautiful tiny hummingbird.” Their high, courageous spirit must derive, he thinks, from being “fully aware of their unique place in this sector of creation.”

Akhal-Tekes are extremely valuable now and bred primarily for the racetrack, and it soon dawns on Maslow that he’s unlikely to be able to afford--much less to obtain--a horse to carry him across the desert. The best he can manage is to saddle up an Akhal-Teke at a stud farm, but his account of the ride takes up only a few paragraphs toward the end of the book and comes as a profound anti-climax given the grand design of his guest. He’s reduced to making a documentary about the horses, capturing them on film. “Central Asia had taught me to recognize personal limits and accept them,” he says. “This is a hard lesson for a male.”

One wishes that more of Sacred Horses had been about such lessons. In a concluding section, the author admits to feeling “a certain dissatisfaction with my travels in Turkmenistan,” and the reader nods in agreement. There’s too much distance between Maslow and the foreign culture he’s exploring. While he surely treasures Akhal-Tekes and all that they represent, his wayward approach to them is muddled. Still, he is a gifted, intelligent, knowledgeable writer, and those who care about horses and horsemanship will find much to savor here.