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that it has never ceased to exercise its hold over the imagination of modern storytellers; although usually it has been trivialised on a level far removed from its original underlying purpose. That typically mid-1960s film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1964) was a good example of such a tale, both dark and sentimental at the same time. A group of motorists in California are overtaken by a car being driving recklessly along a mountain road. It crashes over the edge and they reach the dying driver, a professional criminal, just in time to hear him reveal the whereabouts of a hoard of illicit money buried 200 miles away. At once they are all fired with greed for the money and, after failing to work out any way they can co-operate, they all speed off in deadly rivalry to see who can reach the treasure first. Unwittingly, their Quest is being observed by a local police chief, Captain Culpeper (Spencer Tracy), who has long been on the trail of the dead criminal and even more of his illicit gains. Despite running into every kind of obstacle on their journey, all parties arrive at the goal simultaneously, plus a few more who have heard the story on the way. No sooner have they dug up the treasure, still arguing to the last on how it should be divided, than Culpeper arrests them all for being in possession of stolen money. He then tricks them into driving away in one direction, while he disappears in the other with the `evidence'. Realising they have been duped, they turn round and pursue him, in an exact reversal of the earlier part of the story where he and his men had been pursuing them. They finally trap him on the fire escape of a tall building, while a vast crowd gathers below to watch the drama. As the pursuers catch up with him, the suitcase full of dollar bills bursts open and all the money showers down to the crowd below. Everyone involved in the Quest, including the policeman, has been motivated entirely by greed. They are now all paid out for their egocentricity, as the treasure they have been seeking literally dissipates into thin air.

More conventionally sentimental Quest stories include several examples we looked at earlier where, in each case, because they are simply external projections of the archetype, we find that something has gone askew with the story's proper structure. One instance is Stevenson's Treasure Island where, when the heroes finally reach the site of the buried treasure they have travelled across the world to find, they discover it is gone. The hole is empty. The treasure has already been dug up by Ben Gunn, the `natural man' who, like Robinson Crusoe, has become `king' of the island; although, as reward for their rescuing him, he shares it out among them.

In Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, the hero Phineas Fogg actually liberates the `Princess, his anima-figure, half way through the journey, completely missing the archetypal point; although only at the end, when he has finally reached his goal, is he properly united with her. In Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, although it makes such powerful use of archetypal imagery, the disintegrated nature of the ending betrays the extent to which the story is just playing with the archetypes. The black (therefore, in story terms, `inferior') hero, Umbopa, remains behind, having succeeded to his `kingdom'; while the three white heroes return home with their haul of gold and jewels, which is only a mere material treasure, nothing more profound.

In Babar and Father Christmas, the hero Babar successfully reaches the goal of his Quest by finding Father Christmas and bringing him back to Africa. But here the archetypes all get muddled up, because Babar is already the King and father of his people, so he can hardly succeed to the kingdom as reward for successfully concluding his Quest. Indeed, Father Christmas merely supplies an additional kindly father-figure to the equation, although he then disappears again, while promising to return. So slight and charming is this tale that it might seem churlish to quibble about its failure to match up precisely