Isaiah’s Mountain

By Ceri Leigh Berry

May 1901. Jo stands alone, ready to meet her fate, as British soldiers come thundering up the dusty track of her farm. She has not raised a white flag, it is pointless; the British are burning homesteads to the ground. Choked by the acrid smell of farmlands and livestock, blazing in the valley, Jo struggles to find her voice and the words she needs to save her home.

A strange twist of events transports Jo back to a time when, as a young teacher in the tiny Karoo town of Kweek Valley, she was drawn into the troubled world of a boy named Lukas Bester. A time past when nothing was as simple as it seemed and the truth lay silent and festering beneath the surface of the pious community. A time when she was Joanna Shepherd, an entirely different person…

If she is to survive, Jo has to find the words which uncover the truth as she navigates her way through grief, betrayal and the violence of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398475519

Ceri Leigh Berry

Ceri Leigh Berry has a degree in education with majors in art, English and maths. She worked as a special needs teacher before starting her own family. She is mother to three exceptionally brilliant young adults and lives in South Africa, between Gauteng and the Western Cape, surrounded by dogs and horses. She spends as much time as possible in the Karoo town of Prince Albert where she finds inspiration in the harsh landscape and slows down enough to write from dawn to dusk. She loves nature, art, history, food and travel but most of all loves storytelling. Ceri has been quietly writing poetry and stories since she can remember. Isaiah’s Mountain is her first novel.

Book preview

Book One

Chapter 1

The Break of Day

May 1901

Jo faced the break of day with a quiet calm and steadfast demeanour. She stood alone in the very centre of the dusty track that led to Ouplaas. She allowed her breath to expand the space of her chest, bringing herself to her full height. She wore her husband’s clothes, worn flax trousers, cinched uncomfortably at her waist with a rough leather belt. The brass buckle bored uncomfortably into her skin. Her strawberry blond hair was tucked into a stained leather hat, which shaded the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

She hoped that she looked formidable, she hoped that she looked like a man, though she knew that her manly disposition was unlikely to save her. She also knew that the mild Karoo morning was possibly the last that she would live to see. Her gut twisted with anxiety and a cold shiver ran up her spine as the stuttering of gunshot, which had rung out throughout the night, became louder.

The acrid smell of burning assaulted her senses and in a betrayal to herself, her eyes began to weep. Her breath caught in her throat and she struggled to breathe through the smoke.

The smell of burning fields hung thick and heavy in the air. Jo was certain now that her neighbours were on fire. All that once was, was up in smoke, soon to be ash. Crops, livestock, possessions, people themselves—There was no way of knowing if anything had survived. It was this knowledge that threatened to unhinge her. This and the knowledge that her turn would be next.

She dug her nails into the palm of her clenched hand, determined to keep her composure and give nothing of her feelings away to her enemy.

It was not possible to support both sides of the war, not even possible to remain neutral. Each burgher was forced to choose. Her husband had tried to play both sides and like a game, he had lost. Jo had chosen to stand with her countrymen, the Boers. Her time had come to face the enemy.

Jo had been expecting this moment and had prepared her family for it. She had sent the two children to a hideout, a fair distance to the west of the old farmhouse, in the embankment along a ¹sloot. The two boys were well-hidden by dense Karoo thorn scrub. The range between the old farmhouse and the little den was awkward and barbed with Acacia trees. The boys went by way of the dry river bed. They had been taught to walk over rocks, never on the sandy patches.

There was no well-trodden path to the sloot, Jo had made sure of this. She doubted whether any tracker would find the children, as, unlike the Boers, the British were not known for their tracking skills.

At least, she hoped this was true and that the children would be safe and stay hidden in the little den.

Gerrit was no longer a baby, he was a boy of nearly eleven years old. Jo had the conviction that he would remember all that she had taught him. For a moment she thought of his huge, attentive eyes full of trust in her. Gerrit had loved and accepted her from the tender age of five. He was not her child, neither of the boys were hers and yet she loved them fiercely. They were as if her own, the children of her heart.

Her heart pounded in her ears, adrenalin coursing through her veins. The thudding in her ears became louder and louder. It was echoed by the beat of fifty horses rushing up the ²stof pad that led to the old farmhouse. Jo stood directly in their path, her old ³veldschoen planted firmly in the dust. She had no intention of moving. The party of khaki-uniformed men surrounded her on all sides. The British had finally arrived.

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¹ Sloot: ditch; trench; dry river bed↩︎

² Stof: dust↩︎

³ Veldschoen: strong suede or leather shoes↩︎

Chapter 2

Wakus

It’s curious, the memories that flash through the mind in the face of death. Jo’s memories were a kaleidoscope of images that, in the split second as she stood surrounded by uniformed men, poured out from the deep recesses of her mind.

She saw her stinkwood ⁴wakus packed with recipe books. As a young bride, her recipe books had been her most precious and comforting possessions. Neatly and lovingly held in the old kist, they had made the journey with her from the ⁵Groot Karoo to her new home at ⁶Ouplaas. She saw them as they had once been, in the wakus, on an ox-drawn wagon struggling through the ⁷poort. Grappling with the Karoo heat, the wagon with her precious books had made its way over rocks and through rivers the colour of rooibos tea.

Her books were like loaves of bread in an oven, each one biding its time for when it would be ready to offer nourishment and sustenance to her family. They were her maps and manuals; they had held within their pages all the promise of her new life to come, with the prospects of a home well run, where she would make healing teas and tinctures to restore and soothe her people. She saw her books as they had been then, not as they were now, gently worn and huddled together on a shelf in a kitchen that had never been her own.

Jo’s mind surged with the memory of a vast flock of red-winged starlings that had appeared on her wedding day. A huge and joyous crowd of well-wishers, chattering and whistling to the bride and groom as they departed from the town of Kweek Valley and travelled towards the Kredouw pass. They had followed her and Adriaan along the passage known as ⁸Die Gang, flitting from tree to tree, bush to bush, flashing their bright-orange wing feathers as they went. They reminded Jo of flirty young girls showing their petticoats while whispering and gossiping to each other.

The birds dissipated, leaving behind the memory of a ⁹melktert on an elaborate cake stand. She was flooded with the sickly sweet taste and glutinous texture of a slice of melktert that she had eaten some six years before: the tart presented at a tea party on her first day in Kweek Valley. It had curdled and stuck in her throat. She had detested melktert ever since.

She remembered vividly the perfect awfulness of that afternoon and again she felt a cloying stickiness in her throat. Jo gulped down a breath of thick, smoggy air from the threatening atmosphere that was brewing around her. How she longed to escape or to retrace her steps to a simpler time in her life.

Perhaps it was that longing that had made her remember her books, the starlings and the tea party.

Jo struggled with another deep breath of air. Her memories were inconsequential to the moment she now found herself in, a moment in which her life no longer really mattered. The only thing that mattered now was the moment itself. Everything hinged on it and Jo, aware that it was so, became choked with fear. Her words stuck in her throat as she was surrounded by more men in khaki uniforms.

The frenetic beating of the horses’ hooves drowned out her thoughts. The rhythm around Jo slowed and then stopped as though some unseen drummer had finally tired of pounding his instrument. The men and their horses came to a standstill, surrounding Jo. There was no escape for her.

On closer inspection, the men appeared dishevelled and weary. Their uniforms were not what one would have expected of the army of Her Majesty the Queen. Here and there buttons were missing. Some tunics were bloodied. All were grimy. On some of the men, the uniforms were too small, with the result that seams yawned over their strapping frames.

Some wore pants that rode high up on the leg, revealing boots that were not army-issue boots but more like her own veldschoens. Their various hats—few had helmets—offered scant protection. The men appeared unkempt, displaying facial hair in varying degrees of scruffiness. A few were heavily bearded. It was as though the uniforms were unable to contain the men within.

The overall effect, though, was not one of comedy but of threatening violence.

Many of the men carried double bandoliers slung across their chests. All were sweat-stained and streaked with dust and soot. They hid their weariness behind a facade of loathing and aggression. The horses were strained beyond what Jo knew to be the capacity of any healthy animal. They had come running at her in a kind of wide-eyed panic, foaming at their mouths and slick with sweat over their flanks. There was no organised riding order, the single file, orderly formation of the imperial yeomanry did not apply to this garrison of the British army.

Both soldier and beast were infused with a kind of warrior-like adrenaline, which made the air crackle with tension and uncertainty. Beneath the British helmets and leather hats, leering eyes scanned the ¹⁰werf of Ouplaas and bored into Jo. Any sudden movement, any wrong word from her would have been like tinder to a flame. She could not make a mistake.

Jo had not raised the white flag to the British army and she never would. Gold. Diamonds. Tax. Equal rights. These words had hung in the air for years before war broke out again between the British and the two Boer states. One hundred and eighty thousand soldiers had been sent over to quell a small group of men who the British considered to be backward and inferior—the Boers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.

The British army with its modern equipment and seemingly unlimited resources had been sent to put a stop to the uprising of these farmers and to defend thousands of miles of railway tracks, the mainline of trade and communication with the gold and diamond fields.

The commander-in-chief of the British forces, Lord Roberts, believing victory was imminent, had left for Britain, leaving behind Lord Kitchener, his chief of staff, to finish off the Boer uprising. Kitchener made the policy of farm-burning official by mid-March, though it had been common practice for British soldiers to burn Boer’s farms way before any official policy existed. Under Kitchener, British victory was neither smooth nor immediate.

In spite of its many men and resources, the British army was failing in its mission. The Boers operated in kommandos using guerrilla warfare to prolong the fight. They were too quick and experienced for the British army. In a desperate bid to regain control, the British began to hold the burghers responsible for the destruction of the railway lines, bridges and telegraph wires by the Boer kommandos. The burghers would pay the price by having their possessions and farms burnt to the ground.

The war had come to the Cape Colony and Jo knew that there had been much activity in the area. The railway line through Willowmore to Graaff-Reinet had been badly damaged by the Boers. Every effort had been made to restore the connection, but there had been casualties from the Boers’ constant sniping fire.

Jo did not know much about the politics of war, but she could see that everyone in the district knew the British forces, despite their superior numbers, were no match for the Boer kommandos. The Boers understood the terrain of the Karoo. They were observant and alert, moving swiftly in small groups. The British garrisons, on the other hand, arrived with all the pomp and ceremony of a formal army. Their uniforms were smart, their rifles, the Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield, were the latest, but they were exposed and vulnerable in the harsh landscapes favoured by the Boers.

Burghers had been invited to sign an oath of neutrality. Many had laid down arms and agreed to no longer participate in the war or aid the kommandos. In exchange for this oath, they became ‘protected burghers’. Adriaan had jumped at the chance to be protected by the British army. However, it seemed to Jo, ‘protected’ was not even worth the paper it was written on.

Protected burghers, living in the no-man’s-land of war, were vulnerable to attacks from both sides in an ongoing struggle that had become far from what the British called ‘a gentleman’s war’. Protected burghers were labelled as ¹¹hensoppers by the Boers, who often helped themselves to their livestock and burnt down their farms. The British returned to punish civilians for their failures. Burghers were held responsible for attacks on the railway lines. Kitchener declared that for every attack on the railways, his army would burn down the nearest farm, destroying all livestock and crops in the process. This made Jo both loathe and fear the British army.

Farm labourers and their families were the most vulnerable. They were depended upon by both the British and the Boers for cooking, collecting firewood, setting up camp and tending to livestock. Farm labourers accused of being spies by the British were blindfolded and set before a firing squad. The Boer kommandos had equally harsh treatment for those they suspected of spying. Both sides were guilty of cruelty. It was virtually impossible to remain neutral; every decision was perilous.

Step aside from the house, this farm is now the property of Her Majesty the Queen, barked the soldier closest to Jo.

Surely, he could not be more than a teenager, she thought. Behind him, a man sniggered and another spat onto the ground. Any non-compliance and we will shoot you! he snapped when Jo did not step aside. We will burn your land and your house and you can watch us while we do it! He looked exhausted but spewed aggression like a trapped wild animal.

There was something familiar about his features, the broad smooth temple with its deeply hooded brow. She recognised his posture, the slight slope and rounding of his shoulders, which she realised was a protective and defensive gesture. His cold grey eyes watched the world with deep suspicion.

Behind her Jo noticed men approaching the farmhouse. In a few leaps, they would be on the steps leading to the ¹²stoep and at the old yellowwood door that guarded her home. Jo had to act quickly and free the words she was too terrified to speak.

She remembered the melktert again, stuck, like the words in her throat. She remembered her first-day teaching. She saw a boy, angry, defensive and way too big for his school desk. He could almost have been—

Lukas Bester! Don’t you know by now that you can get shot for impersonating a British officer! the words had found their way out into the open. They rested now, in the tight, unyielding atmosphere.

Jo watched as the boy’s face changed in a moment and his sullen, deep-set eyes softened with recognition. A small smile played on his lips under a smattering of facial hair. Everything about his countenance began to shift. His eyes searched Jo. It was no wonder that he had not recognised his old teacher in her oversized men’s clothing and floppy hat. It had been nearly six years, six years that had changed her soft womanly frame into one that was lean and hardened.

Lukas Bester was not much older than sixteen and yet here he was, a man at war. When Jo looked at him, she knew that all he had seen and done had become etched onto his young body. It showed on his sunburnt and filthy face.

He fell forward in exhaustion, slipping from his bone-weary pony towards Jo before collapsing into her arms. She instinctively reached out to catch him, her arms the branches of a tree offering to him the last bit of shade in a desolate landscape. The uniform he wore crawled with lice. It was not his uniform but the uniform of another young man lying dead, somewhere out in the veld.

The electric atmosphere evaporated in front of Jo. In the heat and smoke and dust were a group of young men all but dead on their feet. They were just boys ravaged by war.

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⁴ Wakus: a chest made for use on a wagon↩︎

⁵ Groot Karoo: Great Karoo↩︎

⁶ Ouplaas: Old Farm↩︎

⁷ Poort: gateway; portal↩︎

⁸ Die Gang: the passage↩︎

⁹ Melktert: milk tart; traditional dessert of custard filling in pastry, sprinkled with cinnamon↩︎

¹⁰ werf: a farm homestead↩︎

¹¹ hensoppers: hands-uppers; derogatory slang for a Boer who surrendered to the British army.↩︎

¹² stoep verandah↩︎

Chapter 3

The English Church Mission School

1895

Joanna Shepherd was barely eighteen when the English Church Mission School in Kweek Valley received her as their new assistant school teacher. She had travelled to the Karoo from a teaching post in Cape Town, bursting with hope and excitement. She was to help with the education of young children in the rudiments of reading and writing.

At the Lovedale Missionary Institution, where she had trained, no distinction was made between students based on privilege or race. Here, under the guidance of the principal Dr James Stewart and the gentle leadership of her mentor, Dr Jane Elizabeth Waterston, Joanna had proven to be an attentive and sensitive student teacher.

Her ideas and outlook on life were progressive and, like many of her fellow students, she believed in equality of all people, no matter their sex or race or tribe. She believed in the power of the written text to promote the enlightenment of the mind. Education through reading was the idea that filled her with zeal and she was intent on taking this idea with her out into the world like a gospel.

It was thought by her superiors that Joanna was destined for a teaching post at a prominent boys’ school in Wynberg in the Cape Colony. She had been handpicked for this auspicious position, suited to only the best of the Lovedale students.

However, after being comfortably appointed at the school, she found that she could not reconcile herself to a life in Cape Town.

The thought of spending time in high society and negotiating the politics of the social scene filled her with angst. She did not want a husband. The idea of keeping house for an English gentleman, she found dreadful. Many girls her age were settling into marriage and starting families, but Joanna was certain that this was not for her.

She had been invited to many social gatherings and always attended, but she never felt relaxed. Beach picnics and afternoon teas, all the rage in Cape Town, made her feel like a worm squirming under a microscope, a plump worm at that. She was awkward, seemed to trip over her words and could never quite think of the right things to say.

The result was that Johanna would spend evenings, sometimes days, after social events examining her every word and reaction and she always found herself lacking. Simply put, she was ill at ease in her own skin and found Cape Town’s social scene a torture. She was just not cut out for life in a big city.

After a short time she resigned from her teaching post and, with the help of the Female Education Society, applied to a new post in Kweek Valley as an assistant teacher. She was immediately accepted, partly because of her reputation as a meek and thorough teacher, but mostly because she had been the only applicant for the position.

Chapter 4

Helmuth House

The ¹³kakebeenwa rolled steadily over the sun-bleached landscape towards Kweek Valley.

The train from Cape Town to Kimberley had been crowded and stuffy. Joanna was the only passenger to disembark at the godforsaken railway siding at Vlakkraal, past Matjiesfontein, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Once the train had left, she waited in the midday heat doing her best to suppress her rising panic at feeling abandoned there.

A simple, single-storied hotel stood one hundred feet from where the train had stopped, but not a single soul was about. Relief flooded through her as a brightly coloured red and green wagon with an ¹⁴inspan of eight oxen drew up to the siding. The driver introduced himself as Jan Witbooi. After leaving a bag of post at the door of the hotel, he loaded Joanna’s suitcases onto the wagon and they set off. He was a man of few words.

Her hope restored and partially covered from the sun by the canvas tent of the wagon, Joanna was able to absorb the vast and sublimely beautiful landscape that stretched before her.

Gently rolling hills and rocky ¹⁵koppies blended with dry river beds and scrubland veld. The Great Karoo stretched before her for miles in every direction, wide and quiet. The space seemed boundless and limitless, a sweltering, shimmering infinity between earth and sky. All was still except for the rhythm of the red wagon wheels and the soothing sound of oxen feet on the dusty road. Joanna could not help herself as she felt slowly pulled into stillness.

The kakebeenwa was the daily post wagon that travelled between the town of Kweek Valley and the railway siding. The thick sand along the dry river bed of the Kat River was no hindrance to the oxen. The combination of ¹⁶boekenhout and yellowwood made the wagon flexible and durable. At Botterkraal, they stopped briefly for coffee while the oxen were watered.

Jan Witbooi unpacked his little tin of ¹⁷saamdra kos from his bag and tucked into his cold potatoes and ¹⁸mosbolletjies, which he was happy to share with Joanna.

The heat was oppressive and seemed to grow more so after leaving Botterkraal. In temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the oxen trudged onwards in a southward direction. After a time Jan Witbooi’s sun-baked face bowed to his chest and his eyes drifted closed. His head bobbed, jerked upright once or twice and then fell forward again as if in prayer.

As he dozed, the oxen followed their well-trodden pathway and Joanna gazed at the stunted growth of the Karoo.

Succulents clung to life in the dry, sandy patches among the stones. A scraggly milk bush with a few pale leaves raised its naked arms to the sun. The paths of the dry river beds were easy to trace, they followed the lines of thorny ¹⁹Acacia karroo trees, which offered a little greenery and shade. Here and there a ²⁰gwarriebos or ²¹granatebos broke through the indiscriminate pattern of the pale scrubland, which was brittle and leached of life.

In the far distance, Joanna could make out the gently undulating folds of the Zwartberg, which were like a living, prehistoric creature, standing sentinel beside a gateway to more fertile valleys beyond. She had heard so much about the Zwartberg, the Black Mountains, a keeper of secrets both ancient and forgotten. She was surprised to see that, on this day, they were not black at all. She thought of better words to describe the mountains: clove brown, Prussian blue, medal bronze. If she had her paint set, these would be the colours she would choose.

Dazed by the heat, she daydreamed about painting a picture. For the scrubby Karoo veld, which was anything but bland, she would choose yellowish-grey like the stems of a barberry bush and dabs of oil green that matched the shell of the common water snail. For the sandy patches, wine yellow, like the body of the silk moth and maybe some reddish-orange, as in dark Brazilian topaz. These colour descriptions she remembered from Werner’s Nomenclature, which she had always loved.

Joanna tried to etch the details of the other-worldly landscape into her memory.

The heat of the yearning countryside settled over her like an elixir, infusing every cell with a sense of well-being. She seemed to swell with each moment; every second spent in the huge primal landscape seemed to increase her capacity for life. She had hardly been in the Karoo for a day, yet she felt she had been there for all time.

Soon the matronly Dutch Reformed Church, with its steeple and little townhouses tied to its apron strings could be seen in the distance. The texture of the landscape began changing from sparse and scattered veld to organised and flourishing farmlands.

From afar the various crops were grouped pleasingly together, bringing new colours and patterns to the landscape. Verdigris green congregated in neat rows on the outskirts of town. There were lines of olive green and diagonal rows of sap green.

Joanna could see how dark green wrestled for space with asparagus green and copper green. These, she soon saw, were the eucalyptus and cypress trees that lined the streets and ushered the post wagon past the formidable church in the centre of the town towards Helmuth House.

Simple cottages with flat roofs in the traditional style stood back shyly from the street. There were gabled Cape Dutch cottages with pretty wooden fretwork and Victorian cottages with pitched corrugated roofs and ornate cast-iron trimmings.

Wooden or cast-iron pillars supported gently curved veranda roofs. The town was crisscrossed by a system of ²²leiwater canals, whose gentle sound of rushing water lent an atmosphere of tranquillity.

Soon Joanna was greeted by townsfolk enjoying the late afternoon with coffee and rusks on their ²³stoeps. She smiled back a warm greeting and was still thinking about the names of colours when she arrived at Helmuth House, a beautiful Victorian villa.

²⁴Meneer and ²⁵Mevrou Samuel Luttig had moved to Helmuth House on Church Street from their farm Uitkyk, on the westerly side of town. After their children had married and left home, they offered board and lodging to the school teachers of Kweek Valley. For a few years they had been hosting Miss Elaine Beukes, head-teacher of the English Church Mission School and, now, they were extending their welcome to Joanna.

Joanna surveyed Helmuth House from her seat in the front of the wagon. The villa and its verdant garden were certainly not what was expected from a district with a meagre water supply. The double-storey Victorian villa with its gables like two wings of a butterfly faced the street in perfect symmetry. Delicate cast-iron latticework formed the balustrade on the first floor.

Wooden fretwork in the shape of a fleur-de-lis framed the underside of the veranda’s tin roof, gently curved in the Regency style.

The villa, freshly painted in