Life On The Edge In A Haunted Land--Last Of Three Parts. By Kevin Franklin STEP BACK, STEP back, step back!" I shout in a growing crescendo to my friend, who's walking on a seemingly innocuous rock surface. He moves slowly back, unsure of the reason behind my sudden outburst. But if someone were standing below this sandstone bluff, he'd see just how closely my friend brushed with serious injury, if not outright destruction. From above, the sandstone looks like solid rock, terminating at a 20-foot cliff. The view from below, however, reveals an incredible overhang of eight horizontal feet, the last several steps tapering to the thickness of a club sandwich. The exact tensile strength of four inches of sandstone escapes me at the moment, but any flunking engineering student could tell instantly that, had he continued toward the ledge, it would have snapped. More than two stories below, a jumble of rocks, apparently ancestors to the current ledge's reach, would have made for a violent landing. As we approached the cliff from above, I saw similar edges skirting the rest of the bluff and it dawned on me, almost too late, that our cliff is, in fact, an overhang. With a new-found respect for our surroundings, and from a safer position, we marvel at the Escher-like quality of the overhang. Almost everyone has seen the drawing of the witch and the maiden--where you look at it one way and see an old hag and then, looking at the same picture, an image of a young woman leaps from the same lines. Psychologists call this "figure-ground reversal." Fortunately we avoided our own--unique--take on the figure-ground reversal. This is the last day of exploration on a five-day trip to the remote coast of Baja, south of El Rosario. We're roaming the desert north of Punta Canoas, where the entire valley seems molded by a supernatural hand. Strange, windswept cliffs of sandstone break through rolling hills of soft, powdery soil. An entire field is coated in magnificent green lichens sprouting from fist-sized rocks--trees on tiny worlds. Glassy sheets of gypsum crumble out of the bluffs. Vast expanses of this bone-dry desert are paved in papery shell fragments, remnants of ancient beaches long since uplifted through geologic processes far beyond the highest of tides. Scattered in various nooks, bits and pieces of abalone shells, clearly worked by human hands, wait to be found. I discover the remains a stone knapper's chert block. From this, the knapper would have made arrows, knife blades or whatever sharp tool was needed hundreds of years ago. The aboriginal dwellers were wiped out by European diseases here in the 1700s. This dark stone has laid here for at least 300 years. I return it to the ground, to its rightful place. Remnants of ancient human habitation abound. The only sign of modern man from horizon to horizon is the road we followed in. Our two trucks, looking overly complex and vulnerable compared to our Neolithic surroundings, wait alongside the dusty track. We return to the vehicles to discover a dead battery in the second truck. Traveling in pairs out here saves a lot of walking--to put it mildly. We continue toward the Pacific. A hundred yards short of the beach, we roll past a collection of gull feathers and stones, purposefully placed at the foot of another bluff. At the end of the road, a four-foot-tall rock cairn stands between us and the beach. The conical cairn is built with terraces. Spaced evenly from the bottom up, concentric rings of black crow feathers rise to the top of the cairn. Someone constructed a stone walkway leading to the cairn, as though it were an altar. A haze hangs over the coast, obscuring the beach at about a mile distant. Except for the wind blowing off the surf, there's no sound--no birds, no signs of animal life. The entire place reeks of necromancy. We laugh it off as a bunch of California New Age woo-woos playing with rocks. Nevertheless, we decide to make camp farther up the beach. I hop into my truck, turn the key and wait as absolutely nothing happens. Because I routinely take my truck into the middle of nowhere, I maintain all its components with religious vigor and carry an arsenal of spare parts. Needless to say, when nary a peep emits from the rig, none of the lights work and the liquid quartz face of the radio is nothing but a blank stare, it's somewhat disconcerting. I track down a blown fuse, replace it and drive to our new camp, concluding there must be a short somewhere in the wiring. But just between you and me and a few hundred miles, thoughts of ancient spirits still trail closely behind.

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