Word: alpenstock
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...pointing us down into the abyss of the unknowable. Alpine travellers tell us that sometimes a terrible abyss is bridged over by a reach of hard drifted snow, so solid that one can walk over it, for the most part, in security; so thin that a stroke of the alpenstock will pierce it, leaving an opening through which may be discerned the blue vacancy beneath. Herbert Spencer drives his staff through the thin stratum of drifted words, of consolidated forms of thought, of congealed tradition which we have felt to be so solid beneath our feet, and bids us look...