Books: Octans and Orena

THE SUNKEN GARDEN—Nathalia Crane—Seltzer ($2). With a poet's precision it is told how, on Nov. 23, 1924, the 16-year-old Duchess of Kendal, later to be known as Orena, was cast upon an Afric isle when her yacht was riven with electric bolts from an oxeye tornado. There she found another "bantling of fate," whose Nordic features suggested that he was an atavism, or at least a primeval anachronism; in any case, a monad. Soon he was able to convince her, however, that he was descended from the Child Crusaders of the 13th century,...