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personal contact the hero has with his other world of the distant future is his friendship with one of the Eloi, a pretty young girl called Weena, whom he rescues from drowning and who then slavishly follows him everywhere - until the final nightmare chase through the dark forest when she is snatched away by the shadowy Morlocks and presumably eaten. Similarly in The Third Man Holly Martins's only real point of engagement with another person in the unreal, nightmarish world of Harry Lime's Vienna is his friendship with the beautiful, enigmatic actress Anna, with whom he falls in love. But one of the most memorable scenes in the film comes right at the end, after Lime's funeral. Martins waits for Anna as she walks towards him down a long avenue in the wintry cemetery. Finally she reaches him and passes by without a look, leaving him to make his departure from Vienna friendless and alone. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder's only real personal engagement with the other world is his strangely intense friendship with Sebastian, later transmuted into his love for Sebastian's sister, Lady Julia. And of course the final cue for his `expulsion' from the world of Brideshead is Julia's breaking off of their engagement. The only woman he has ever loved has to be left behind, and Ryder returns to his `normal' world again to face the rest of his life, as he puts it, 'childless, middle-aged and loveless'.

Such is the position of the hero of one of the most famous of all Voyage and Return stories, Orpheus, who, after his journey through the underworld, has to leave behind him forever his great love Eurydice. Having gone there to bring her back, he is told he can do so on one condition: that, as he returns to the upper world, he keeps looking forward and does not look back. At the last moment, just before he steps out into the daylight, he looks back to see if Eurydice is following him. Instead of coming back joyful, with his life immeasurably renewed, Orpheus thus returns from his journey loveless, alone and untransformed. And it is no accident that the other heroes who must leave behind the woman who has become important to them during their time in the other world emerge 4 similarly untransformed.

A story which might seem to offer something of a variation on this pattern is Alain Fournier's novel Le Grand Meaulnes. Meaulnes, an uncouth teenage boy, disappears one night in the French countryside. When he returns a few days later, exhausted and shaken, he has had a very strange adventure. He had got lost and, looking for somewhere to spend the night, he had come across a house blazing with light. On entering, he found himself plunged into a strange, dreamlike scene of revelry, involving a crowd of gay young people and children, dressed in clothes of a bygone age. He and the daughter of the house, Yvonne, found themselves mutually attracted. But suddenly the party had come to an end, the young people disappeared, and Meaulnes found himself all alone at a country crossroads. Has it all been a dream? So far it is a typical Voyage and Return adventure. But then comes the twist. Meaulnes eventually runs across Yvonne again in the `real world', and marries her. Almost immediately, however, he has to go away and returns to find that she has died, in childbirth. In other words, although he has eventually been united with the girl he met in the other world, he still loses her. Their surviving child is the only proof that she ever really existed. But even he is now being brought up by someone else. At the end of the story Meaulnes is thus left `childless, loveless' and alone.

A similarly hard-to-disguise bleak ending concludes another, even more famous twentieth-century story shaped by the Voyage and Return plot, Gone With the Wind, the novel by Margaret Mitchell which in 1939 became one of the most successful films ever made. We meet the heroine Scarlett O'Hara as a beautiful adolescent girl in the `normal' world of her upbringing, the ante-bellum slave-owning Southern aristocracy and her home in her family's great house Tara. Like everyone