Three weeks after that bewildering and rewarding day in the water-meadows of Shipley, I was 5,000 feet up in the Pyrenees, struggling to make sense of an extraordinary series of phenomena which my rod had revealed in the mountain village of Arinsal. The discovery of the line from the Wolstenbury tumulus led me eventually to Shipley. There, the necessity to make some sense out of what was appearing round the church led me to investigate the known surviving aspects of Templar history. This in turn demonstrated unequivocally that there was some relationship between the suppressed Order of Knights Templar and the massacred sect known as the Cathars. The last refuge of the Cathars was high upon the towering mountain of Montsegur - and two years earlier, the Spanish part of the family had acquired a holiday chalet in Andorra, scarcely two kilometres from Arinsal. The events that brought me to Andorra were perfectly prosaic. I used to spend part of each year in Spain, combining business with domestic arrangements. In 1975, my wife suggested that we go to Andorra for a weekend. We did so. Both of us fell in love with that mountain survival of the Middle Ages and we acquired a holiday chalet in the most remote and delightful valley of Xixerella, some 5,000 feet up in the Pyrenees. The fact that I was able to spend a reasonable time each year in the Iberian Peninsula was to have a profound significance at a later stage of my explorations.

Shortly before that summer of 1975, I had come across a book called 'Le Defi Cathare' by Paul Guillot, in which Guillot draws the reader's attention to a legend which tells of how four Cathars left Montsegur, the Cathars' last important redoubt, on the night of the 12th of March, 1244, by an underground passage with the 'treasure of the Cathars'. No-one knows where they went. According to tradition the Cathars were in possession of the Holy Grail and this is what they were alleged by some to have taken with them. Guillot discusses various possibilities and legends, including one which states that they came to Andorra, a land nurturing a sturdy and independent folk, more or less outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and in particular to a cave in the valley of Arinsal. They later merged into the local population, successfully claiming them for 'Protestantism'. My first expedition was naturally to Arinsal but, not having been in Andorra since my discovery of the lines, I made a preliminary survey. At the frontier with Spain, I ran into groups of circles like those at Shipley, and further determined that a line about 30 metres wide was running up the valley. It went all the way to Les Escaldes, where a branch about 10 meters wide went up via La Massana to Arinsal.

When I made my detailed survey of Arinsal, I followed the thick line to a point above the village, where it ended more or less where the macadamed road becomes a dirt track, and a pattern of squares and circles developed, a mini version of Shipley. My interest quickened. They spread over a substantial area and, on taking the newly installed chair-lift to the top of the mountain, I found them on the way, and at the top, thus proving that dowsing in a chair-lift is also possible. On descending to the road again, I looked for a possible source of the lines. There was a small Romanesque church at the side and away from the village. Building materials surrounded it and the area appeared to be under reconstruction and excavation. Human bones were stacked in random heaps around the place. I dowsed it. A V-shaped triple emerged from the circular apse. the door was a round wooden one and padlocked. I wandered round it again, dowsing idly. The rod picked up extra single lines. I was startled. They weren't there the first time. My niece, Caroline, was with me and I had established earlier that she could use a rod. "Tell me what you find," I said. "Hundreds of lines," she replied. She was right. They were coming out in all directions. Puzzled, I went into the area of the circles. They were now squares with four triple parallels inside. Even more puzzled, I went home.

The following morning I returned alone. The triple V-shape was there, but nothing else. An idea struck me. "Give me the lines," I thought to the church. It did. This was the point of no return, the discovery that the so-called 'ley-system' is in living, active use. I repaired to a nearby cafe and enquired of an obliging Andorran girl where I might obtain the key of the church. "It's private," she said. "It belongs to Senor Amadeo Rossell, who is reconstructing it. The village church is somewhere else." He turned out to be a man of mature years, and owner of Andorgas, the propane and butane distribution company. He was pleased to talk about his church. He explained how he had bought some apparently virgin ground, presumably to build a house, and he had discovered the ruins of a 12th or 13th Century church, which appeared to have been destroyed at some time in an avalanche. The building was flattened, leaving about four feet of walls above the foundations, but all the original stones were there. He had decided to reconstruct. He had sought the advice of M. Pierre Cantury, a noted Andorran archaeologist. the name immediately rang a bell. In Guillot's book, he acknowledges Cantury as the source of his information about the Cathars in Andorra and the cave in Arinsal. Cantury was away on holiday. I explained my interest to Senor Rossell and also congratulated him on his decision. "It must cost a lot," I said. He, wringing his fingers in characteristic style, replied, "I would like to leave something in Andorra by which my grand-children will remember me.

"Senor Rossell did not have the key, explaining that it was with two students who were working in the church at Pal. He gave me permission to get it from them. Pal is in the next valley. We parted, and I drove up. Two students on ladders were carefully chipping away at the plaster on the church to reveal the medieval paintings beneath. I announced my business. They immediately gave me the key to the church at Arinsal. I explained about the dowsing business. They looked at me wide-eyed. I did a quick dowse. Beneath the floor-boards, yet to be taken up, was a zone. More interesting was a side-chapel and altar cut from the living rock. A single line emerged, and the pendulum, which I could now use, gave a positive reaction. I promised to return the following day to tell them more in response to their entreaties. Back at the church in Arinsal, I located the source at the base of the altar, obviously new, and we looked around at the rough floor of the 12th Century stone. "Let's have a little loving," I said. We did, mentally, of course. I noticed that suddenly a zone of activity had spread half-way down the tiny church, where nothing had been before. We left. I noticed that the dowsing phenomenon outside the church had changed. It was now based on concentric rings in groups of seven around the church. They extended to our home and faded after two hours.

Next day, I arranged to meet the students, Eudaldo and Toni at Arinsal. I had brought my tape recorder/cassette. I had noticed, by chance, in playing a tape of 'Jesus Christ Superstar', the song 'Ho-sanna, hey-sanna' which has the verse, when Jesus is talking to Caiaphas on Palm Sunday:

"Why waste your breath, moaning at the crowd?

Nothing can be done to stop the shouting.

If every tongue were still, the noise would still continue:

The rocks and stones themselves would start to sing.

"I played the opening bars of the overture and switched to the song. The source of power, if that's what it was, at the base of the altar, expanded rapidly and bolted like a rabbit out of the door. It obliterated all other phenomena, and was dowsable at La Massana, five kilometres away, some sixty minutes later, in concentric rings of seven. On another occasion, I played the 'Hallelujah Chorus' from Handel's 'Messiah'. The effect was not so dramatic, but the power went out of the church and again, albeit huge squares centred on the church, phenomena were present over a large area and this time I was able to check them as far away as Les Escaldes, some eleven kilometres away.

(Map of Andorra - not in MS)

Eudaldo and Toni were by now expressing the keenest interest in what was going on. I agreed to instruct them in the art of the rod. It was they who first noticed that, at Pal, the living stone altar was doing the same thing as the church of Arinsal. Later on I was to establish that I could discern whether they were working in the church or not, simply by dowsing our front garden some miles away, finding sides of huge squares being emitted due to their presence in the church, and to their being in a state of awareness. The interesting thing was that I had dowsed the garden every day for a fortnight before I met them without noticing anything untoward. Now just by their being there, the altar was emitting. One thing was clear, however. They believed that what I had told them was true. Sometimes I had to go up to the church and remonstrate with them as the emissions were affecting my experiments. It would shut down on request at the source itself and later I was able to shut it down at a distance by a mental request of some concentration.

During our visit to the church at Arinsal, Toni and Eudaldo drew my attention to a stone they had found at the side of the altar in the ruins. It was a pentagon in form, not of equal sides, but as follows; tapering upwards and cut off at the top before it came to a point. "We feel this is interesting," they said. It was of a sedimentary type, white and as if aerated. There was a quarry of this type of stone in Andorra. I took it outside and dowsed it. Each facet emitted a line. With the students' permission I took it home. In doing so, I had the strangest feelings of hostility and I left it in the car overnight. The following day, I placed it on the window-ledge and dowsed it. Nothing. Remembering our switch on-switch off experience at Arinsal Church, I conducted similar experiments with the stone. It worked in the same way. "Give us some squares," I said. It did - with four triple lines inside. "Something else," I said. It produced single line circles. "Next, please." It was like talking to a colleague operating a slide projector - and so it went into a square with a different lineal combination. "Next, please," and so on. It was lunch-time so I put it away. The following day, I set to work again. It opened up with the same series of symbols, just like those I had found at the Templar Church at Shipley, except that those at Shipley were always static. This stone was putting up different lineal symbols on request. It moved to squares, circles, rectangles, E-shapes and circles within squares within circles in strange and apparently meaningless combinations. I recorded three hundred of them and began to lose patience. "What does it all mean?" I thought. After a long question and answer session with the stone, I asked, "How many frames must I go through?" - "1,000", at which point I broke off to try to make sense of it all.

I informed my son, Nicholas, of these results. "Ask him his name, Dad," he said. "PIOTAM," was the reply, spelled out. "Let me ask Piotam some questions," he said, "I'll write them down without telling you, and you find the answers." Thirteen year old don't boggle like forty year olds. Some of his questions were serious, others cheeky. Finally he asked, "Is the source of this intelligence on this planet?" - "No." "In our galaxy?" - "Yes." "Where?" (*illustration of double E symbol) "What is the double E?" So ended one of the most remarkable communications of my life. It was the precursor of many, much more remarkable. I persisted at various odd moments in trying to establish more facts from Piotam, as he was now affectionately known in the family, sitting in his place of honour on the mantelpiece. I established again that he was not the Cathar Grail. That was in Arinsal and in the cave, which encouraged us to make the expedition recorded later. We decided to visit Montsegur in France, the last redoubt of the Cathars. He indicated that he had been to Montsegur and would like to accompany us on the journey. He did.

It was when Pierre Cantury returned from holiday that some light was thrown on the original purpose of the stone. Toni and Eudaldo had noticed at a church at Encamp that a small square building at the side of the church had a Piotam-type stone on the roof, surmounted by a metal cross. It performed. I investigated this and established that the small house or chapel was on the cardinal compass points, and took some measurements. But these were useless, as I later learned that the building was reconstructed. I was more than fascinated, because in previous conversations with Piotam, I had questioned him closely as to what part of the church he had come from and had been firmly told that his position was on the roof, projecting upwards towards the skies, and that was where he wished to return eventually. At this point I was able to meet Pierre Cantury, director of social services in Andorra, whose responsibilities include archaeology. He is a man of considerable reputation in the area. The students had already primed him about my visit and he was not disposed to mock. Little by little, I went through the story with him. When asked about the little 'chapel' at Encamp he was immediately forthcoming. "It is a magic house," he said, and went on to explain that there had been others like it in the area, now destroyed. A magic house was an adjunct to the church where the priest would conduct magical rites, which would not meet with the bishop's approval if carried out in the church. These included the summoning and dispelling of storms. Indeed, it had been used as such in his lifetime. Made of the same stone as the Piotam's, there had been an altar in side the 'magic house'. He himself had seen an old lady of the town conjure up a storm by going to the square and using a stone-age axe head and a Christian cross, chanting to the four points of the compass. Many Andorran village households still kept these axe-heads as talismans.

Later, he called me to his office to examine the reliquary he had found under the altar at Arinsal during the excavations preceding restoration. It was carefully constructed from the same stone as the Piotam's and after taking the lid off, another smaller container was revealed, containing nothing. It performed as a Piotam. I later noticed its curious resemblance to the altar he had drawn for me. I found another chapel near Encamp with a Piotam high up in the campanile and formed the hypothesis that the church builders of Andorra were aware of the powers of the Piotams and built them into their works deliberately. I also found evidence that the Piotam phenomenon was not first associated with Christian churches, for I had noticed near the church at Arinsal what appeared to be a standing stone, which performed the Piotam routine. This stone is connected via other stones to the church and to another larger, clearly cubic stone some half a mile away. This, in turn, is connected to the terraces. Later we discovered others which indicated the Piotam system to be extensive and to involve Christian and pre-Christian sites. We also discovered that Piotam was on call even out of a ram's horn spiral in the mountains. I also noticed that after Piotam No.1 had been removed from Arinsal the wide line in the valley appeared smaller. When I restored Piotams I and II to Arinsal, the Arinsal line exceeded its earlier width.

It was mid-August when I decided to look for the cave at Arinsal and one courteous inhabitant led us part of the way. "It's up there on the right," he said, pointing to a gully running precipitously up the mountain, "although I've never been in it." We started the ascent. It was not easy, for much of it was on loose stones. I entered the cave on hands and knees, but after a few yards I was able to crouch. Nick followed me in. At one stage we could stand upright, but after twenty yards or so the roof descended to a gap of eighteen inches. Nick crawled forward and poked his head under. He could see a chamber on the other side. I had learned how to dowse with a pendulum and it gave a reaction indicating the existence of a 'power' source nearby. I realised at this point that we were ill-equipped to go further. Protective helmets were essential, more than one torch, candles etc. We retired.

Happily it was soon to be my birthday, so I was able to prevail upon the family to give me helmets, haversacks, water bottles, etc., as birthday presents. The following day a much better equipped expedition set out and we went in under the eighteen inch gap. On going under, we found ourselves in a chamber perhaps twelve feet long and six feet wide. A further small tunnel led off to another smaller chamber in which one could stand up, but it was only about three feet in diameter, and that was the end of the system. An investigation revealed stalagmitic activity. The cave must also from time to time have been filled with water, because every upper surface was coated in a clay-like material. The floor was an unknown depth of a mixture of stone and clay-like earth. In my earlier discussions with Piotam, it was emphatic that we would find the Cathar Grail in this cave, and that we would find it this day, my birthday. That very morning I had received the letter from Bill Lewis stating that the Cathar Grail, according to a map dowse, was in Arinsal, although I had not given him that name. Our expectations were high. In the cramped circumstances of the cave I used the rod and found a straight line. Other lines developed and simple calculation based on these indicated a spot in the cave which was the source, as the different lines met there. We had no tools except the rods and we commenced a crude excavation. I remembered Piotam's statement that I would find the Grail on my birthday and I felt perhaps we had really discovered the position of something, even if we had not seen it.

In the interval before our next visit, I questioned Piotam. I was told we had located it and that there were scrolls in the cave as well as objects of copper, gold and silver. It became more fascinating and so, on Monday 25th August 1975, we set off again, taking food, stimulants and proper excavating tools. Piotam said I would find it within one hour and at 12.15 we started to dig. At 1 o'clock we had put aside in a bag various objects of small size, including some chips of a material that glinted in the candlelight, but nothing of obvious interest. I persisted in the area indicated by the rod and, amongst some stones of indeterminate and insignificant shape, began to isolate one which was different. It contained a cross-like shape protruding from a flat base and, on loosening it from its position, I put it in the bag for further examination. We went on digging and at 1.15 Paul said, "The hour's up." I took out the pendulum and obtained a nil reaction. Likewise with the rod. "Ask it if we should go on digging," he said. I did. "No," was the answer. "Have we found it?" I asked. "Yes," came the answer. "Paul," I said, "it is in the bag, and I think it is that strange stone." We decided it was time for lunch and went outside the cave and perched ourselves on a ledge. There was room to walk around and I took the strange stone, still coated in clay-like mud, and placed it in a recess on the mountain. I invited it to produce squares. It did. Paul was able to dowse them too. It performed like Piotam. "Who are you?" I asked. "Piotam," it replied. "Are you the Grail?" "Yes,"it said. We ran a few more tests. It performed. We went home and I started to wash the stone which was encrusted with clay. The strange shape of it was confirmed; a cross on a base all made of a crystalline material and translucent.

That night a huge wind blew up. I had to get up in the night to secure the shutters and check the house. The next morning the telephone lines were down and snow was on the mountains, something the Andorrans could not recall having seen before in August. I was extremely depressed and nervous the following morning and could not stir myself to contemplate the object, but after lunch I got it out, feeling rather dubious. Fragments that had broken off during the excavation had glinted in the candlelight, and we had seen the equal-armed cross-shape of this odd stone in the daylight at the mouth of the cave. It proved to be completely composed of crystalline material which glinted at the edges. We had brought out a bagful of assorted fragments which I also subsequently washed. Many of them were of the same material, and looked as if they were fragments of a broken plate. One piece was like a geode broken in two, with the crystals clearly standing out like a fragment in a jeweller's window. So there it was. I set it out on a window ledge and considered. It was no artefact that I could identify. Man does not make crystals. They are formed by nature. The strange shape was undeniable, although it was embedded in a clay-like earth. What was strange was that the Cathar symbol was the equal-armed cross. Only a fragment resembled a geode. The rest appeared to have been formed within a mould. It made no sense to my untutored geology. Putting all that to one side, the fact remained that the object performed.

The result of hours of questioning seemed to be that the crystalline object which I termed the 'grail stone' was some sort of master control of the various Piotam stones I had acquired previously. That is, in talking to Piotam, we were also talking to the Grail, who was Piotam. In response to further questioning we learned that Piotam was a person who lived in our galaxy but not in our solar system, in the constellation of the Bears, for Trionis, mentioned by Piotam, in Latin means the Great and Little Bear. Later it became clear that (*illustration of double E symbol) was the symbol for ELOHIM, who emerged as a separate intelligence from PIOTAM, as he now stated his name to be. At any rate in the early communication, Piotam kept referring to the Elohim as being the people who understood the symbols. I had always understood Elohim to be plural, viz. Genesis Elohim, the sons of God who gave children to the daughters of men. However, later Paul established that Elohim was singular and, in a book about the Kabbala, I discovered that Elohim was one of the names of God. This seemed to account for a somewhat confusing exchange with Piotam, and we came to the conclusion that Piotam was a separate intelligence, and that Elohim was another, who claimed to be of God. Sometimes I felt we were holding conversations with our subconscious selves. However, I was always sure that at times something was going on independent of myself. I had too many surprises, and when Toni and Eudaldo started their dialogues with a Piotam stone and became convinced, one was bound to accept that something most extraordinary was going on. Nevertheless I continually voiced my fears about self-delusion.

I was idly re-reading a book called 'Les Templiers Sont Parmi Nous' by Gerard de Sede, when I came across a reference to Pope Sylvester the Second, a strange 12th Century Pope. The Knights Templar, in their secret statutes, observed that it was only during his reign that the real Church of Christ on earth existed. Apart from making some striking technological inventions, a new type of clock and a steam organ, he was supposed to have had a copper head which answered questions and foretold the future. The author pointed out that it only answered "Yes" or "No" and therefore functioned like a binary computer. Could it be that we were dealing with the same phenomenon? If this were the case, we should have to be very careful with our questions. For instance, the word 'important' could mean a hundred different things. Important to whom, relative to what? It was a wholly contingent word, and we would have to use only absolute questions, even though it made discussions tedious, and involved many supplementary questions to get at the truth, or the real opinion of the intelligence. Furthermore, I suspected that communication was telepathic rather than verbal. We should have to discipline ourselves to frame absolute questions and rid our minds of the jumble of mental static that goes on with most intellectual activity. The result of this was to make sessions shorter and quite tiring. It did, however, appear to be the right approach and cleared up many misconceptions. The idea that what we had found in the cave was unimportant turned out to mean that the object itself was unimportant, whereas the intelligence behind it was not.