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The apparitions of

GARABANDAL

BY
F. SANCHEZ-VENTURA Y PASCUAL

Chapter Four

DETAILS OF A FEW TRANCES

Page 61

some little girls her own age, they started to apply the new therapy to cure her. This consisted of taking her to the beach and to funfairs. These two forms of entertainment were novel to her. But her heart was in the mountains, with her playmates and fellow visionaries; and with Our Lady, who was always in her thoughts. "As I was taken to the beach every day, the Virgin didn't appear to me."

   After a week of this, a friend of her family's intervened and arranged for her to return home. Her mother went to pick her up. "The doctor got very angry and said lots of things to me so that I shouldn't go home. And I told him that I hadn't seen the Virgin, but that I was sure the others had." And she closes the episode in her diary saying: "They were all very good to me really."

   When she arrived back at Garabandal, she encountered "several Padres and a lot of people who were on their way to meet me." Mary Loly and Jacinta, who were in a trance in the church, had just announced "that I was coming up the road, as in fact I was." The Virgin had told them. The people had immediately set out to see if it was true, and had met her on her way up from Cosio. At home once more, Conchita told her friends that, while in Santander, she had only had one vision, but that she had spoken to the Virgin once, without seeing her. "She told me that she did not appear to me more because I went to the beach."

Secret Revelations

30.—On July 29th, the little girls had an ecstasy under the close scrutiny of a doctor, who took their pulse and diagnosed their normality. The spectators were all crowding round, causing a lot of noise and making it difficult to hear the visionaries' words, spoken as they were in that husky whisper. The general din was only increased by the collapse of a rough stone wall onto which a number of onlookers had clambered.

   A couple of Civil Guards attempted to restore silence. All at once, the trance concluded. They returned to normality.

   "The Virgin says that we're to go up to the pines; and that our parents, the priests, the nuns and the Civil Guards can come, too. But they must remain at a distance. And the rest must stay farther away still."

   They climbed the hill to the pine-grove. Calmly, the little girls pointed out the positions that everyone should take up. The Civil Guards made as if to keep the crowd back, but, incredible though it may seem, they obeyed the little visionaries' instructions to the letter.

   The Vision had told them that the onlookers might watch, but

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