People reach out in final act of devotion

He reached out to the world like no other Pope before - and today the world paid John Paul II back a thousandfold. From every corner of the globe they came, from Bologna to Buenos Aires, from County Mayo to the Congo, a stunning kaleidoscope of the faithful who had nothing in common save their Catholic beliefs and their love and respect for a man who changed the meaning of what it is to be Pope.

There were nuns from Ethiopia, factory workers from Katowice, students from Caracas, and for a few magnificent hours today it seemed as if the world itself had been emptied into the ancient cobbled streets of Rome.

Pride of place may have been given to the bishops and archbishops, the magnificently robed cardinals and other dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church, to say nothing of the ranks of world leaders - from George Bush and Tony Blair to the president of Lithuania - but, for all its pomp and ceremony, today belonged to the people.

That, without a doubt, is the way the late John Paul II would have wanted it: and the people knew it.

They knew it when he was alive, when he made that superhuman effort to come to the balcony on Easter Sunday and tried - unsuccessfully - to utter a few words to the worshippers gathered in St Peter's Square; and in death they knew it too, when his body was carried across the square at the beginning of the week on an open catafalque, flanked by Swiss Guards in their Renaissance uniforms of orange and blue.

John Paul II was the Pope who made his mark by travelling the world to see his flock, the first jetage Pope. This week his devotion to the people was transformed into those extraordinary scenes when people queued in their hundreds of thousands for hours on end, just for the privilege of a few moments filing past his body in the Basilica. By the time the lying in state ended last night, it was estimated that two million people had been in to see him.

One of the most moving aspects of the queue was how its nature changed over the week. On Monday and Tuesday it was mostly made up of Italians, with a few foreigners thrown in every now and again.

By Thursday the queue had become overwhelmingly Polish as people arrived from the Pope's homeland, busload after busload. As they proudly held their red and white Polish flags in the spring sunshine, they looked like an army of the devoted come to reclaim the man born Karol Wojtyla for their own. As John Gore, a car salesman from Manchester, put it: "All those Poles - it's amazing. It must be empty, Poland."

The Pope was more than just a fellow Pole who helped give them some much needed national pride: by visiting Poland in one of his first Papal pilgrimages, the first Pope to go behind the Iron Curtain, and by giving encouraging words to Poland's Catholics, he has been credited with helping to hasten the downfall of the Communist monolith in Eastern Europe.

"Thanks to him and Lech Walesa, communism fell," said Elzbieta Raginiak, 25, a student from Gdansk. "The Pope was always important to my family, and especially to me. When I was living in Rome when I was 18 and feeling lonely, I came to St Peter's Square to hear him say the Angelus, and did not feel lonely any more. Now he is in heaven, and we are still here. We miss him."

Everyone in the crowd had their own reason for making the pilgrimage to Rome. For Antoine Pham, 40, a Vietnamese video technician living near Geneva, it was out of gratitude for the Pope's role as an international peacemaker. "I wanted to pay my respects to the Holy Father because I was born in Vietnam during the war. America used all its money and power and arms but was never able to win peace for my people. John Paul had only the crucifix and his words, but he changed the world. He made peace, he fought Communism, all without killing a single person."

For Mr Gore there was nothing political, no great global message, just a simple faith and a devotion to the man he saw as a spiritual inspiration. "There was something about the bloke that was very special," he said. "I think he meant a lot to lots of people, if they were not of any real faith. He was just a fantastic bloke."

Today those goodbyes, private and personal, came to an end, and it was time for the last great farewell to the Pope who served for an astonishing 27 years: in the 2,000 years since St Peter, only two Popes have served longer.

The Pope was buried wearing his liturgical vestments, with a white bishop's mitre on his head. A white silk veil was placed on his face while a prayer was read.

As the coffin was brought out from the Basilica onto the steps of St Peter's for the beginning of the open air funeral mass, Psalm 41 was sung - the traditional psalm of thanksgiving for rescue from illness.

Then, at the end of a service of two-and-a-half hours of elaborate, centuries-old ritual, the final journey of Pope John Paul II began. As a single bell tolled he was borne out of the "door of death" on the left of the main altar in the Basilica and down to the crypts below, where the faithful believe the remains of St Peter himself are buried.

Amid the cramped underground passageways lined with frescoes, murals and sculptures, the Pope's final resting place will be in the space once occupied by the tomb of John XXIII. Nicknamed "The Good Pope", he died in 1963 but has since been beatified and moved up to the main level of the marblelined Basilica.

Before being entombed, the body of the Pope was to be sealed inside three coffins. The first wooden coffin was to be placed in a zinc coffin, which was in turn placed in a massive wooden casket. Between them they are meant to slow the decomposition process.

Buried with the Pope will be a small bag of commemorative medals issued over the course of his 26-year pontificate, as well as a sealed document featuring a brief description - in Latin - of his life.

Unlike the ornate sarcophagi in which many of John Paul II's predecessors were laid to rest, the pontiff 's tomb will be a simple stone slab featuring his name, as well as his dates of birth and death.

Even before he was interred most of those gathered in Rome today already knew what his final resting place was to be: harder by far to tell what his place in history will be.

Many voices have been raised for the Pope to be called "John Paul the Great" in recognition of his extraordinary papacy.

Was he a great Pope? Today, in Rome, whatever the rest of the world might think, few people had any doubts. Sister Joan Marshall, originally from Rhyl in North Wales but now a nun with the Sisters of St Mary of Namur in Belgium, said: "You just have to look around you. He was a great Pope. What other figure would have 200 dignitaries from all over the world at his funeral and more than four million people?"