IT began as a pilgrimage, a sentimental voyage to Africa's northernmost cape to complement earlier voyages that had led to another cape, far to the south, at a continent's tip. But it ended more as uncharted meandering along Tunisia's less beaten tracks, beach and forest and antiquity, a journey freckled with surprise and discovery: how, for instance, to prepare and cook a brik; or how they hunt wild boar in the winter with dogs, beaters and shotguns in the uplands back from the coast. Then there were the carpets, made of wool, bought over mint tea in an old and magical house in the Tunis bazaar; and the painting of pheasants, done on mirror glass; and, at the end, after a chance turning through plantations of blue gum and pine, the unfurling of surf-scrubbed beaches at Cap Serrat, where there was no one and nothing save wind and white sand and the angry legions of the waves.

The pilgrimage was prompted by an urge, after a decade of living in Africa, to complete the points of the continent's compass, create a navigator's symmetry from its sprawl. In the past there had been visits to Dakar, Senegal, in the west, and Berbera, in the Somali Republic, in the east - an axis of sorts. There had been journeys to the southernmost reaches of anguished South Africa itself, starting from the cape that inspired Cecil Rhodes, Britain's colonialist supreme, to dream of a span of empire reaching to Cairo. (His grave, in the Matopo Hills of western Zimbabwe, points that way still.) But the north was patchy, an incomplete mosaic built around brief visits to Libya and Egypt - until I saw the chance reference in the Tunisian guidebook to Cap Blanc as Africa's northernmost point, farther north than Crete and as far north as Sicily. That was a temptation too strong to resist, and too laden with expectation perhaps to avert some small disappointment, as with the closing of a final chapter.

The route, in the rented car, led north from Tunis, whose bazaar had offered a first impression of crass entrepreneurialism, and tawdry gewgaws on sale mostly for the benefit of tourists arriving in packaged tours from Western Europe and filling the hotels of such better-known places as Hammamet and Sousse and the southern isle of Djerba, hard by the frontier with Libya.

But then, behind the great mosque at the heart of Tunis's old town, and close to the glittering booths of gold and silver jewelry sold mainly to Tunisians, there was a store set in an old home with crooked stairways and a flat roof ornamented with tile. The story was that the house had been owned by an Italian who had resisted the urge to modernity and decreed that, even after her death, its tradition be preserved. That was the shop, called Ed Dar, that sold its wares at fixed prices -mainly to foreigners, too, it seemed - but offered a respect for fine things: rugs certified as being of first quality; Roman vases; couscous bowls with intricate designs signed by the craftsman who made them; tapestries depicting the nation's marriage tradition, wishing women fertility and men the strength of lions. That was where the Mergoum rugs, patterned in the manner of southern Tunisia in zigzags and squares of cream and blue, and the mirror-glass painting of pheasants, were purchased in a hectic hour before leaving the capital.

Tunisian roads demand patience and restraint: pedestrians like to stroll the highways, as if by right, trucks lurch, traffic cops await the incautious (but, as if by instruction to tolerate foreign visitors, forgave this tourist at least a moment of exuberance). The car, moreover, seemed rattly, belying the rental company's avowal that it tried harder. But the road north held its delights. First, 25 miles from Tunis, there was the old and layered settlement of Utica, founded in 1100 B.C. and about 200 years older than Carthage itself, which it replaced as capital of Provincia Africa after the third Punic War. Here, in a tranquil byway filled with mimosa, were the ruins of the settlement, once a port and now six miles from the sea (a distance formed by alluvial deposits over the milleniums), with tombs, a modest archway and, most of all, Roman mosaics, between the cypresses, that seemed dull and inert until a guide sprinkled water on them, recalling their patterns of fish and lobster and squid to a sudden and vivid life.

Utica, the guide said, had known many occupiers - like much of Tunisia - and its heritage is layered: Phoenician first, then Roman, then, in parts, Byzantine. In Utica, the strata of old civilizations lie atop one another like tiers of a historical cake, preserved for the sampling.

The route led onward another 15 miles to the port of Bizerte, where people fish and stroll below the ramparts of a Spanish fort; and from there, on a rocky, three-mile track, to the northernmost part of Africa, a continent's last surrender to a sea that divides what is called the third world from what, with implicit arrogance, is called the first.

AT this spot one must expect ruminations on an African theme, awareness of the great land mass stretching to the south, from the Arab lands where Islam has long held people together against foreign intrusion, then down, through the belts of rainforest and the savannas, along the routes once taken by people whose language is known generically as Bantu and whose migration -maybe from the Congo basin centuries ago -styled a subcontinent. Turmoil there is, in parts, ineffable beauty in others; pain and hunger, maybe, but often a smile or laugh to ease a hard moment through hard times. Africa is imbued with a vigor that others have lost, caught in a time warp it did not request or invent.