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• n  a stout staff with a metal point; used by mountain climbers

• Clad in khaki slacks and armed with an alpenstock, the Royal Family's brisk old (77) host, Jan Christian Smuts (who had walked up the mountain while royalty rode), hastily .
• Has no intention, as things stand, of reaching for his alpenstock.
• And as a kind of horrid climax to the purge, a Soviet agent befriended Trotsky in Mexico City, then hacked him to death in 1940 with a steel-bladed alpenstock.