The limbs, the face, and the chest gave my hands a sensation of cold, but very different from that which I had often experienced from contact with corpses.
Knowing that he had passed several nights without sleep, and endured extraordinary fatigues, I did not doubt that he had fallen into that profound and lethargic sleep which is superinduced by intense cold, and which if too far prolonged slackens respiration and circulation to a point where the most delicate physiological tests are necessary to discover the continuance of life.

The pulse was insensible; at least my fingers, benumbed with cold, could not feel it.

My hardness of hearing (I was then in my sixty-ninth year) prevented my determining by auscultation whether the beats of the heart still aroused those feeble though prolonged vibrations which the ear continues to hear some time after the hand fails to detect them.
The colonel had reached that point of torpor produced by cold, where to revive a man without causing him to die, requires numerous and delicate attentions.

Some hours after, congelation would supervene, and with it, impossibility of restoration to life.
I was in the greatest perplexity.

On the one hand I knew that he was dying on my hands by congelation; on the other, I could not, by myself, bestow upon him the attentions that were indispensable.