The keeper of the stone will live forever

“The keeper of the stone will live forever” is the promise attached to the Sea of Flames, a legendary assurance that gives Reinhold von Rumpel’s search its supernatural appeal and its terrible urgency. The phrase first emerges among fragmentary stories he reads about the gem; later, as his illness advances and his search fails, it hardens into a conviction he cannot abandon. The novel presents the promise as a force in von Rumpel’s imagination, not as proof that the stone can defeat death.

The Legend and Its Images

While ill and staying in a hotel, von Rumpel struggles to focus on research materials sent from Vienna: copies of works by Tavernier and Streeter, along with stencil duplicates of de Boodt’s 1604 Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia, written in Latin. Together, the materials offer only nine paragraphs about the Sea of Flames. Their brevity does not restrain his imagination. He pictures an earth goddess in love with a sea god, a prince who recovers from catastrophic injuries and rules within a blur of light, and a tongueless priest voicing the promise of eternal life.

These images reach him through books but take on the force of visions. The goddess charges through tunnels of earth, leaving glowing drops of flame behind her; the priest’s saying becomes one element in a charged private mythology. Von Rumpel also hears his father’s advice to see obstacles as opportunities and inspirations. The legend’s assurance thus joins the personal language through which he interprets hardship, giving his pursuit both a mythical frame and a means of pressing onward.

A Promise Under Pressure

The saying returns when von Rumpel’s search has yielded three false stones. The diamond before him briefly seems to show the red heart associated with the gem, then proves to be another counterfeit, the work of Dupont. His luck, as he sees it, is spent. His doctor says the tumor is growing again, while Germany’s military prospects are collapsing; men from the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, who had been searching for concealed cultural objects, may soon be sent to fight.

Against this accumulating evidence of failure, the promise persists: so long as he keeps the stone, its keeper will live forever. The thought does not resolve his danger or establish that the legend is true. Instead, it makes surrender feel impossible even as his hands grow heavy and his head feels like a boulder. The certainty of the saying stands in sharp contrast to the failing body and uncertain future surrounding it.

Meaning in the Search

The phrase turns possession into a wager against mortality. For von Rumpel, the gem is not merely an object to locate: the legend makes keeping it seem like a condition of survival. That belief lends purpose to his pursuit even after counterfeit discoveries and renewed illness should have stripped it of hope. His fixation is sustained less by evidence that the promise works than by the possibility it offers.

The recurrence also preserves an ambiguity between legend and material fact. Von Rumpel encounters stories and images, then confronts diamonds that are demonstrably false; the phrase itself remains an assertion of the legend, not a confirmed property of any stone. Its force lies in that gap. As his physical strength diminishes, the promise of endless life becomes more compelling—and more visibly at odds with the mortal limits from which he hopes to escape.