buzzati

For nineteen days, we had seen them gallop throughout the entire peninsula with great astonishment, their legs the sole source of energy, and we then watched them continue in the Alps, on the climbs and descents, right next to the precipices. One hundredth of what the last of them had done would have crushed us… What remained now of this frightful labor? Had it produced anything? Nothing. Pure fatigue, then, offered in sacrifice to a senseless mania?

Buzzati, writing on the final day of the 1949 Giro.