I think i'd better put it here. This is my fav. among all the texts that I have learned. Though years have passed since I read it first time, segments of this exerpt come up in my mind time and again. It's wired. And my thanks go to blog.hjenglish.com. I seached this passage online for a long time and finally found that this site has it.

 

No Signposts in the Sea
V Easkoille-West 

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 　　 In the dining-saloon I sit at a table with three other men; Laura sits some way oft with a married couple and their daughter. I can observe her without her knowing, and this gives me pleasure, for it is as in a moving picture that I can note the grace of her gestures, whether she raises a glass of wine to her lips or turns with a remark to one of her neighbours or takes a cigarette from her case with those slender fingers. I have never had much of an eye for noticing the clothes of women, but I get the impression that Laura is always in grey and white by day, looking cool when other people are flushed and shiny in the tropical heat; in the evening she wears soft rich colours, dark red, olive green, midnight blue, always of the most supple flowing texture. I ventured to say something of the kind to her, when she laughed at my clumsy compliment and said I had better take to writing fashion articles instead of political leaders.
　　The tall Colonel whose name is Dalrymple seems a nice chap . He and I and Laura and a Chinese woman improbably galled Mme Merveille have made up a Bridge-tour and thus beguile ourselves for an hour or so after dinner while others dance on deck. The Colonel, who is not too offensively an Empire-builder, sometimes tries to talk to me about public affairs; he says he used to read me, and is rather charmingly deferential , prefacing his remarks by 'Of course it's not for me to suggest to you…" and then proceeding to tell me exactly how he thinks some topical item of our dome, the or foreign policy should be handled. He is by no means stupid or ill-informed; a little opinionated perhaps, and just about as far to the Right as anybody could go, but I like him, and try not to tease him by putting forward views which would only bring a puzzled look to his face. Besides, I do not want to become involved in discussion. I observe with amusement how totally the concerns of the world, which once absorbed me to the exclusion of all else except an occasional relaxation with poetry or music, have lost interest for me eve to the extent of a bored distaste. Doubtless some instinct impels me gluttonously to cram these the last weeks of my life with the gentler things I never had time for, releasing some suppressed inclination which in fact was always latent. Or maybe Laura's unwitting influence has called it out.
　　 Dismissive as Pharisee, I regarded as moonlings all those whose life was lived on a less practical plane. Protests about damage to 'natural beauty' froze me wit," contempt, for I believed in progress and could spare no regrets for a lake dammed into hydraulic use for the benefit of an industrial city in the Midlands. And so it was for all things. A hard materialism was my creed, accepted as a law of progress; any ascription of disinterested motives aroused not only my suspicion but my scorn.
And now see how I stand, as sentimental and sensitive as any old maid doing water-colour s of sunsets! I once flattered myself that I was an adult man; I now perceive that I am gloriously and abolescently silly. A new Clovis, loving what I have despised, and suffering from calf-love into the bar gain, I want my till of beauty before I go. Geographically I did not care and scarcely know where I am. There are no signposts in the sea.
　　The young moon lies on her back tonight as is her habit in the tropics, and as, I think, is suitable if not seemly for a virgin. Not a star but might not shoot down and accept the invitation to become her lover. When all my fellow-passengers have finally dispersed to bed, I creep up again to the deserted deck and slip into the swimming pool and float, no longer what people believe me to be, a middle-aged journalist taking a holiday on an ocean-going liner, but a liberated being, bathed in () mythological water s, an Endymion young and strong, with a god for his father and a vision of the world inspired from Olympus. All weight is lifted from my limbs; 1 am one with the night; I understand the meaning of pantheism . How my friends would laugh if they knew I had come to this! To have discarded , as I believe, all usual frailties , to have become incapable of envy, ambition, malice , the desire to score off my neighbour, to enjoy this purification even as I enjoy the clean voluptuousness of the warm breeze on my skin and the cool support of the water. Thus, I imagine, must the pious feel cleansed on leaving the confessional after the solemnity of absolution .
　　Sometimes Laura and I lean over the taffrail , and that is happiness. It may be by daylight, looking at the sea, rippled with little white ponies, or with no ripples at all but on-ly the lazy satin of blue, marbled at the edge where the passage of our ship has disturbed it. Or it may be at night, when the sky surely seems blacker than ever at home and the stars more golden. I recall a phrase from the diary of a half-literate soldier, ‘ The stars seemed little cuts in the black cover, through which a bright beyond was seen.' Sometimes these untaught scribblers have a way of putting things.
The wireless told us today that there is fog all over England.
　　Sometimes we follow a coastline, it may be precipitous bluffs of grey limestone rising sheer out of the sea, or a low-lying arid stretch with miles of white sandy beach, and no sign of habitation, very bleachedand barren. These coasts remind me of people; either they are forbidding and unapproachable , or else they present no mystery and show all they have to give at a glance, you feel the country would continue to be flat and featureless however far you penetrated inland. What I like best are the stern cliffs, with ranges of mountains soaring behind them, full of possibilities, peaks to be scaled only by the most daring. What plants of the high altitudes grow unravished among their crags and valleys? So do I let my imagination play over the recesses of Laura's Character, so austere in the foreground but nurturing what treasures of tenderness, like delicate flowers, for the discovery of the venturesome.
　　 My fellow-passengers apparently do not share my admiration.
　　‘Drearee sorter cowst,' said an Australian. ‘Makes you Iong for a bit of green. '
　　 Darkness falls, and there is nothing but the intermittent g1eam of a 1iahthouse on a solitary promontory .
　　We rounded just such a cape towards sunset, the most easterly point of a continent, dramatically high and lonely, a great purple mountain overhung by a great purple cloud. The sea had turned to a corresponding dusk of lavender . Aloofad on the top, the yellow 1iaht revolved, steady, warning; I wondered what mortal controlled it, in what must be one of the loneliest, most forbidding spots on Earth. Haunted too, for many wrecks had piled up on the reefs in the past, when there was no beacon to guide them.
The Colonel joined us.
　　‘How would you care for that man's job?' he said.
　　‘I suppose he sets relieved every so often?'
　　‘On the contrary, he refuses ever to leave. He is an Italian, and he has been there for years and years, with a native woman for his only company. Most people would think him crazy, but I must say I find it refreshing to think there are still a few odd fish left in the world.
　　This is the unexpected kind of remark that makes me like the Colonel; there is a touch of rough poetry about him. I like also the out-of-the-way information which he imparts from time to time without insistence; he has traveled much, and has used his eyes and kept his ears open. I have discovered also that he knows quite a lot about sea-birds; he puts me right about the different sorts of gull, and tells me very nicely that that couldn't possibly be an albatross , not in these waters. The albatross, it appears, follows a ship only to a certain latitude and then turns back; it know show far it should go and no farther. How wise is the albatross! We might all take a lesson from him, knowing the latitude we can permit ourselves. Thus, and no farther, can I foIlow Laura. I suspect also that there is quite a lot of lore stored away in the Colonel's otherwise not very interesting mind. Laura likes him too, and although I prefer having her to myself I don't really resent it when he lounges up to make a third.
　　In all this great serenity of ocean it is seldom that we espy so much as another ship; the jolly dolphins and the scratchy little flying-fish have the vast circle all to themselves, 'the Flying Fish, who has a part with the birds, ' and doubtless are glad to see the last of the monster which bears us into and out of sight. Our wake closes up and we might never have been. But it does happen from time to "Time that an island appears on the horizon, nameless to us and full of mystery, the peak of a submarine mountain range, lonely, unblemished , remote. Does one like islands because one unconsciously appropriates them, a small manageable domain in a large unmanageable world? I cannot tell why it should give me such a queer sensation to reflect that that island has always been there (unless indeed it be no more than the work of the patient coral and will be there still, should I return to find it waiting for me. It is the same sensation as I have experienced in looking at a photograph of, say, some river valley of innermost China, and seen a boulder, and thought that if I could find myself transported to that spot I could touch the reality of that particular piece of rock ... It is there. For me. I could sit on that very boulder . I explain myself badly, and it is not a sensation I could expect anyone save Laura to understand, but of such incommunicable quirks is the private mind made up.
　　 Well, the islands. I divert myself by inventing the life upon them, and am amused to find my imagination always turning towards the idyllic. This is the new Edmund Carr with a vengeance. If we have seen a skiff sailing close in shore, I follow the fisherman as he beaches his craft in the little cove and gives a cry like a sea-bird to announce his coming. His woman meets him; they are young, and their skins of a golden-brown; she takes his catch from him. In their plaited hut there is nothing but health and love.
　　 One night we passed two islands, steeply humped against faint reflected moonlight; and on each of them, high up, shone a steady yellow gleam.
　　‘Not lighthouses.' I said to Laura. ‘Villages.'
We gazed, as the ship slid by and the humps receded into darkness and even the lights were obscured by the shoulder of a hill, never to be seen by us again. So peaceful and secret; so self-contained .
One of the ship's officers joined us, off duty.
　　‘Yes, 'he said, following our gaze. ‘One of them is a leper colony and the other a penal settlement.'
　　God, is there no escape from suffering and sin?
　　Laura and I amuse ourselves by watching for the green flash which comes at the instant the sun disappears below the line of the.horizon.This does not happen every day, for sky must be entirely clear of cloud and clouds seem very liable to gather along the path of the setting sun, but we are as pleased as children when our game succeeds. Laura claps her hands. Only a second does it last, that streak of green light; we wait for it while the red ball, cut in half as though by a knife, sinks to its daily doom . Then come the twilight colours of sea and heaven (we have discovered the fallacy of saying that darkness falls suddenly in these latitudes, at any rate on sea level), the wine pink width of water merging into lawns of aquamarine , and the sky a tender of pink and blue. But the green flash is our chief delight.
　　‘creme de menthe , ' says Laura
　　‘Jade, ' I say.
　　‘ Emerald , ' says Laura. ' Jade is too opaque
　　‘Vicious viridian , ' I say, not to be outdone .
　　'You always did lose yourself in the pleasure of words
　　Edmund. Say green as jealousy and be done with it.'
　‘I have never known the meaning of jealousy.'
　　I am sorry to see the sun go, for one of the pleasures I have discovered is the warmth of his touch on my skin. At home in London I never noticed the weather, unless actually inconvenienced by fog or rain; I had no temptation to take a flying holiday to the South and understood little when people spoke or wrote of sunlight on white walls. Now the indolence of southern latitudes has captured me. I like to see dusky men sitting about doing nothing. I like the footfall of naked feet in the dust, silent as a oat passing. I like turning a corner from the shade of a house into the full torrid glare of an open space. I put my hand on metal railings and snatch it away, burnt. But it is seldom that I go ashore.
　　I would never have believed in the simple bliss of being, day after day, at sea. Our ports of call are few, and when they do occur I resent them. I should like this empty existence to be prolonged beyond calculation. In the ship's library stands a large globe whose function so far as I am concerned is to reveal the proportion of ocean to the landmasses of the troubled would; the Pacific alone dwarfs all the continents put together. Blue, the colour of peace. And then I like all the small noises of a ship: the faint creaking, as of the saddle-leather to a horseman riding across turf , the slap of a rope, the hiss of sudden spray . I have been exhilarated by two days of storm, but above all I love these long purposeless days in which I shed all that I have ever been.

(from No Signposts in the Sea, 1961 )

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1) V. Sackville-West (1892-1962): Poet and novelist. Her published works include the poem The land, Collected Poems (1933) ; the novels The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and The Eagle and the Dove (1943). With her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, she edited Another World than This (1945), an anthology.
2) Mme: abbreviated form of the French word 'madame'
3) Bridge-four: The card game of Bridge is played by four people.
4) Empire-builder: referring to civil servants and army officers sent out by the British government to administer her colonies. At present, a slightly derogatory term, applied to jingoists and chauvinists.
5) Pharisee: member of a Jewish religious sect (from about 120 BC). They were more puritanical than the other sects; term now applied to a hypo critical or overrighteous person.
6) moonlings: inhabitants of the moon
7) Midlands: region in West Central England, around Birmingham
8) Endymion: in Greek mythology a beautiful shepherd loved by Selene, the moon goddess
9) Olympus: mountain range on the borders of Macedonia and Thessaly in northern Greece; home of the Gods in Greek mythology
10) Drearee sorter cowst: Australian pronunciation for 'Dreary sort of coast'
11) Edmund Carr: a middle-aged journalist on a holiday, the narrator of this piece of description
12) vicious viridian: very intense bluish-green color