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 In the twelfth century, the Ariège Valley was still formed of a huge lake closed before Tarascon by a natural dam. Its waves beat the flanks of the ‘Cathar haven’, an impressive mountain massif with innumerable caves: Ussat, Ornolac and Bouan, the caves of Lombrives, Fontanet, Ramploques, the Hermit and many others.
Gadal focused all his attention on these caves. Not only was he the operator of the Lombrives cave, but he also owned many other caves (sixty altogether) in the nearby villages.
For Gadal, such caves, such ruins close to abysses, could only be sanctuaries of a prodigious antiquity. Right from the oldest times, they were already – he was certain of this – centres of initiation of the first druidic spirituality.
The Sabarthez had been used very early as an asylum for men, groups of men animated by a high spirituality and a great independence of spirit and who were looking for the silence and serenity of the mountains and the depths.
It is interesting to note that the Ariège valley – formerly occupied by a vast lake – has a strange wide-mouthed shape evoking an open cup, a Grail. That gigantic alchemical melting-pot, where telluric currents coming from the depths of the earth meet cosmic radiations, has produced along the centuries a great force of inspiration to which the souls thirsty for the Spirit were sensitive.
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