A fifth of the world's high-tower cranes are mounted on a 48.2km strip of the Persian Gulf, running from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, each serving teams of migrant workers toiling through the night by spotlight on 12-hour shifts.
It takes them nine months to knock up a 50-storey block of luxury flats, sold out instantly - at least for now - to Arab investors flush with petrodollars, Europe's tax exiles, and, lately, Iranians in need of a bolt hole. Indian workers crawl like ants over the half-constructed Burj Dubai, soon to spiral up 800m in glimmering layers, more than triple Canary Wharf.
From the Burj, you look past a Manhattan of rising skyscrapers to the Jebel Ali International Airport, where work is under way on the hub of all hubs, boasting six runways and eight concourses for 146 million passengers a year, as much as Heathrow, Frankfurt, and Paris combined.
"I can see $200 billion of projects from my window," says Edmund O'Sullivan, the editor of the Middle East Economic Digest (Meed). "Go to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan - they're all copying Dubai. If they see a piece of desert, they think it would look a lot better with concrete on it.
"With oil at $70 a barrel, this region is cooking, and the consensus is that this will go on for another five years. What happens after that is the big question," he says.
In the 1970s, petrodollar billions spread across the globe, mostly wasted on luxuries or recycled through banks into Third World booms and busts.
"They have learnt their lesson. This time the money is going on infrastructure at home," says Motaz Ibrahim, an economist at Shuaa bank in Dubai.
The International Monetary Fund forecasts that oil states will rack up a current account surplus of $480 billion in 2006, three times China's surplus. A chunk of the money is going into the US bond market, keeping the American housing bubble afloat, or into big name global companies.
The past few weeks alone saw a fresh crop of eye-watering ventures. The Saudis unveiled the $27 billion King Abdullah Economic City, a Paris-sized monster rising from dust beside the Red Sea, with a port to match Rotterdam, and a "Square Mile" of banking towers on a reclaimed island.
Not to be outdone, Abu Dhabi upped the ante with its $28 billion spree, led by plans for a 150 000-strong city with 29 hotels - including a futuristic seven-star flagship, now de rigeur in the Gulf.
Hoping to trump them all, Kuwait is to spend $150 billion on its "Silk City" for 700 000 people, with a 1km tower to be built by Eric Kuhne, the designer of Bluewater in Kent. It will be twice the height of any building now in existence.
A hop away, the petrol sheikdom of Qatar is spending $130 billion building a smelting and industrial hub. Disdainful of brasher Dubai, it aims to capture the world's seriously rich at its Pearl Islands complex in Doha.
There are now more than $1 trillion investment projects under way in the Gulf region alone, quadruple the level 18 months ago, according to a Meed survey.
Oil, gas and petrochemicals are taking $316 billion, however, the lion's share of $540 billion is being spent on construction, hotels and property.
Who will occupy the property, since scarcely anybody lives in or around the Arabian peninsular? The population of the six states of the Gulf Co-operation Council (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman) is just 36 million.
"It's obviously a bubble. There will never be enough tourists to make all this work, but you can't quote my name: I have to live here," says a financial expert.
Most remain exuberant, swept along by the intoxicating boom, too busy making fistfuls of dirhams and dinars to dwell on the immense risk posed to this hyper investment by rising global interest rates.
The oil bonanza is the direct result of the monetary policies of the US Federal Reserve and the Europe's banks, which flooded the world with liquidity from 2002 to 2005 by holding interest rates at or below inflation.
The Bank of Japan chipped in, spending $600 billion of printed money on US bonds between from January 2003 to March 2004 alone. China let rip with top-down credit. All are now turning off the tap. Some are draining fast, fearing inflation. A global downturn will come as surely as night follows day, and we will see what happens to oil.
Dubai, perhaps, has the chutzpah to pull off its gamble. It alone has torn down the barriers to foreign ownership of property. Running out of oil, now just 7 percent of gross domestic product, it has reinvented itself as a media, show-biz, sporting and money entrepot, with a budding "City" presided by a British judge, under UK commercial law, aiming to capture the region's petrobillions.
Conjuring an archipelago of islands and sandy beaches out of blank water, Dubai is earning its place as a phenomenon that everybody will have to see once in their life. In keeping with its tone of high kitsch, a $20 billion "Desert Disney" promises an indoor rain forest and ski slope (Dubai's second), a life-size Taj Mahal, and of course the biggest shopping mall in the world.
Love them or hate them, the ruling Maktoum family have launched their ventures with a swashbuckling bravado now almost extinct in the crabby, static societies of old Europe.
"In the 19 years I've been working in the Dubai, I've never seen the Maktoums fail in any big project, so don't write off all this building as a bubble," says Mike Derrett, a consultant to Dubai World Trade Centre.
Yet politics intrudes. Beirut was once the luxury haven of the Middle East, until rival militias sprayed gunfire into every hotel along the Corniche.
Terrorism is surely a threat if a cell of Islamic hotheads should ever take offence at the occidental hedonism of Dubai, so close to Mecca? As for that trillion dollars worth of projects, I fear the cranes will freeze as suddenly as they did in Bangkok when the music stopped in 1997, leaving a hideous sky-scape of girders and struts, but this time on a vastly greater scale. - The Daily Telegraph