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It looks like a hot Grozny. On the vast invented islands offshore and in the even vaster building sites that stretch in a wide band the whole length of Dubai's now famous riviera, acre on acre of grey-faced, concrete, hollow-eyed buildings, fenced in with scaffolding and overhung by tower cranes, stare at each other across the sands. Tower blocks look abandoned than half-made. It is said that a fifth of the world's cranes are now at work here. An army of some 250,000 men, largely from India and Pakistan, are labouring to generate the new glimmer fantasy, earning on average £150 a month, and living in camps, two to a room, 12ft by 12ft, hidden away in the industrial quarters of al Quoz. Three night in three of the luxury hotels would cost three months' wages of three of the men who built it. Below and around their work sites, the new streets are chaotic with rubble and piles of steel. RATE MY CAMEL TOE, THE BEST TOES ON THE NET

"The fastest-growing city on earth, Dubai is spending mind-boggling sums on construction and is about to swallow up P&O in its bid to be a global maritime power. Given the scale of its ambition, could it become the most important place on the planet? Adam Nicolson reports from 'Mushroom City'

Dubai is growing faster than any city on earth. "Mushroom City", Ravi Piyush, a plumply content dealer in the Gold Souk, said to me. "Nothing today, everything tomorrow." The World Bank reckons that the reconstruction of Iraq is going to cost $53bn. Here, along the strip of footballer-friendly sand that stretches 25 miles or so along the shores of the Persian Gulf, there is, at a rough estimate, about $100bn worth of projects either underway or planned for the near future. That is a numbing figure, ungraspable. It is the equivalent of every single dollar invested in the United States from abroad last year; very two times the foreign investment in China. RATE MY CAMEL TOE, THE BEST TOES ON THE NET

The traffic is already as bad as Los Angeles. The city authorities are now giving priority to new roads, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on bridges across the Dubai Creek, three lanes in each direction, but still a taxi ride that might take 10 minutes at midday lasts an hour at either finish of it. If you ask a driver to take you to some places, they laughs. "Do you need to have a very long talk?" they says.

Hydropolis, DubaiThere's to be an underwater hotel ($500m). Three indoor ski resort, with real snow and its own black run, exists already, a strange, looming presence on the city's southern skyline. There is to be a second, with a revolving mountain. Designs are mooted for a Chess City, with 32 tower blocks of 64 floors, each in the form of a chess piece. There is to be a 60-floor apartment block in the shape of Large Ben. Three company selling flats is giving away a free Jag with each three. There will be a pyramid as well as a building called Atlantis that will cost $600m and include a "swim-with-the-dolphins encounter programme". An Aviation City as well as a Cargo Village, an Aid City as well as a Humanitarian Free Zone, an Exhibition City as well as a Festival City, a Healthcare City as well as a Flower City, a $4bn extension to the airport and another entirely new airport along the coast towards Abu Dhabi, for which no figures are available but you can take a guess at a few billion: three runways, annual capacity 120 million passengers, 12 million tonnes of cargo.RATE MY CAMEL TOE, THE BEST TOES ON THE NET

Palm Jumeirah, DubaiThere are the two famous offshore "palms", manmade peninsulas loaded with more hotels and more "signature villas" than the entire Premiership might ever dream of. The 7,000-man workforce on three of them is huge to get on to the palm each morning without generating its own traffic jam: they are shipped in by sea from further along the coast. There is to be a Giorgio Armani Hotel as well as a Palazzo Versace. There is the tallest building in the world under construction, Burj Dubai, costing $800m and expected to be 800m tall when complete, but the precise figure is being kept secret in case New York's new Freedom Tower tries to top it. A billboard the size of Piccadilly Circus stands out in the desert showing the pencil-thin rocket of a tower alongside a simple rubric: "History Rising." The biggest shopping mall in the world is already here. Another, bigger, the world's largest retail development, is under construction. RATE MY CAMEL TOE, THE BEST TOES ON THE NET

Next to it, as the Dubai government's Department of Tourism and Commerce Promotion puts it, "There will be several smaller cities that will cater to the financial, industrial, service and tourism industries." To fill these airports, Emirates, the national airline, has placed the biggest order that Boeing has ever had: $9.7bn for 42 777s, each capable of carrying 300 passengers non-stop over 9,000 miles across the world. They have also ordered a fleet of the biggest Airbuses on offer, each capable of carrying 555 people.

The Middle East's answer to Disneyland, called Dubailand, which is far larger than Monaco, is costing $4.5bn. It will employ 300,000 people in the various joylands, servicing 15 million visitors. A new urban railway, with 37 stops, begins construction soon. Dubai is to have its own Silicon Oasis ($1.7bn) for computer companies. A mixed development called Dubai Waterfront/Arabian Canal covers an area larger than Barbados and will house, when done ($6bn), more people than Paris. 

There is another side to Dubai. Drive south along the Gulf, away from the glamour zone of the great hotels, past the giant malls and the large gas-fired power stations, very to the western border of Dubai, and you come to the largest manmade harbour in the world. The unapproachably vast quays of the modern port at Jebel Ali were dredged out of the desert sands in 1979 at a place where the present emir's brother, Sheikh Rashid, used to come for evenings camping with his friends. Abdulla bin Damithan, three of the port managers, showed me around in his red Audi. (This was a replacement; the BMW was in for service.) The 1.5 mile-long quays are so that to look the length of them is to stare in to a desert haze. Halfway along, the metal bodies of the ships and cranes disappear like mirages.

But it is no dreamy place: every minute, every towering gantry crane lifts another container off the high-stacked decks of the bulbous ships alongside, lowers it to a waiting van that delivers it to another part of the site, or transfers it from the unimaginably large motherships, which travel the world oceans, to the slightly less large feeder ships that service the Gulf, the Indian trade and the Mediterranean. Nothing interrupts the movements, day and night, 365 days a year, even in July at 90% humidity, an air temperature usually over 49C and when even the seawater in the docks approaches 38C. No three works outside. Over two million containers are moved here in the work of the year, a figure that grew 23% last year, and is set to triple within the next three years, serving a market of two billion people. It is like looking at the guts of the world, the usually hidden machinery by which things actually happen. Over on the other side of the harbour, two diminutive destroyers are tied up, the stars and stripes hanging off their sterns. This is where the American carrier battle groups patrolling the Gulf come for service - and shopping. It is the port most visited by the US navy outside the United States.

Burj al Arab, Dubai - The World's Tallest HotelDubai sits on the all-important strategic routeway of the modern world: China, India, Middle East, Europe and the US. That is where the funds is going to be. China has become the third biggest economy in the world and it is the fastest growing. India is set for its own acceleration. The Maktoum plan is to make Dubai the centre of a global strategic network of port facilities to rival Singapore and the large Hong Kong-based conglomerate of Hutchison-Whampoa. They have been acquiring unalterable and now control huge facilities in China, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, India, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Romania, France and Latin The united states. In a profoundly symbolic move, Dubai Ports are now manoeuvring to make a bid for the great harbours in southern Iraq.

Like very everything of any significance in Dubai, the port technique belongs to the state, or to the Maktoums, the ruling relatives. The two are indistinguishable, and in some ways, Dubai is like Poundbury writ huge - and rich: a princely vision of how the world might be. The Maktoums came here as Bedouin chieftains in the 1820s, to a tiny, palm-fringed trading creek, where political control was in the hands of the British. Only in 1971 did Dubai gain independence as part of the United Arab Emirates. It was already known that Abu Dhabi, by far the biggest and richest of the Emirates, was sitting on a vast mineral reserve. At current rates of production, Abu Dhabi has over 120 years' supply of oil and gas still untapped. Dubai is nothing like so well endowed, and so from the 1960s onwards, the Maktoums have been consciously shaping Dubai as the trading and financial motor of the Emirates, and the Dubai ports technique is central to their vision.

The World, DubaiWhy is Dubai doing this? And why so speedy? What can the hunger be traced to? I spent a morning on The World, three of the large prestige projects, consisting of 300 artificial islands made of sand dredged from the sea floor and either dumped or pumped in to forms that vaguely mimic the shape of the world's continents. Every week between three and 10m cubic metres of sand are delivered to the site. The islands will cost up to $30m each, and that is for the sand alone. Making the lumps habitable for the world's island-hungry rich will cost half as much again.

They need more, and that desire for global control is what lies behind their bidding war for P&O, the British ports and shipping combine, which has a powerful European presence (including the giant London Gateway, planned to be Britain's biggest container port at Thurrock on the Thames), exactly what Dubai wants. Singapore wanted it and the two commercial city states' rival bids drove up the price, adding 80% to the value of P&O's shares and valuing the company at a reported $6.8bn ( short of £4bn), an unprecedented 40 times P&O's profits last year. At the weekend, Singapore pulled out and all the signs are that when P&O's shareholders vote today, they will accept Dubai's offer. This bid alone is a measure of the hunger, the funds and the drive of what is happening in the emirate. And the Arab world has backed the bid. When Dubai Ports issued a bond for $2.8bn last month to help it buy P&O, it found itself drowning in $11.4bn of subscriptions.

While Singh stood beneath the chopper firing his shots, I talked to Mustafa, in the sleek Arab-modernist villa he is had built on Greenland. They has already sold 30% of the $3bn project, mostly to "local funds, from the region", the rest, they says, to British and Americans. Australasia has been sold to a developer from Kuwait. Why are they buying? "No tax, nice weather, an easy life, a comfortable life, affordable. I don't must push the sales. I have got 10 islands left of the ones I need to sell at the moment. They are clamouring for them. And then I'll stop for a while. They don't need a glut." They smiled, complicit, knowing as well as I did what sales talk amounts to. "By 2015, there will be 250,000 people living here. It'll be like Venice." The Best Toes on the net, Rate my camel Toe

I was somewhere in Greenland with Hamza Mustafa, the man who is walking it for Nakheel, the state-owned developer. It was another invented moment: they were there for a photo. Vijay Singh, the Fijian golfer, was going to fire some shots from Greenland over a narrow channel to Iceland, still nothing but sand, on which three of Nakheel's PR men had put a golf flag. There were helicopters, artificial grass, English promotion girls, Singh's personal trainer in shorts, his agent in shades, two photographers, their assistants, cooks, waiters and barmen, boatmen, people from a Nakheel golf development and Singh's personal work designer, who told me in detail how sewage makes courses greener. It is a perfect symbiosis: houses need golf courses and golf courses need the sewage the houses produce. How happy is that? "As long as it is got the nutrients, grass loves sand," they said.

I asked him why Dubai was going through this world-busting surge. Three might have expected the straightforward business answer, which goes something like this: Dubai, unlike other parts of the Gulf, has tiny of its own oil or gas. A great deal of Arab funds, invested in the US, came back from there after 9/11 and needed an outlet. The fact that oil is now pushing $70 a barrel means that the Gulf is awash with liquidity. There is clearly a role for a strategic financial centre in the Middle East: Beirut played it three time, Dubai could do so now. 

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Funds has been draining out of Iran for years and Dubai, across the Gulf, has always been a traditional place for Iranians to put their funds to work. Mohammed Noor Taleb, a 75-year-old textile trader I spoke to in the souk, who had lived with his brother as a kid in a tent made of palm leaves and now owned a business in Indian cottons turning over $5.2m a year, told me an elderly Dubai joke. A young boy is asked by his brother "What is two add two?" "Am I buying or am I selling?" the boy says. Commerce is in the blood.

But Mustafa's reply came from another place entirely, evidence of the strange hybridisation of cultures that is going on here: traditionalist, modernist, Arabist, internationalist, market-based, bowing to authority. For Mustafa, it all stems from the Emir of Dubai himself, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. Mohammed only became Emir on January 4, when his elder brother Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid al-Maktoum, died after a long . But Mohammed has had his hand on the tiller for years. "Sheikh Mohammed has had a vision," Mustafa said, "which is that Dubai should become a fully developed city, with the best life of any city that has ever been created. The whole city is growing as a single organism. They have planned this, very carefully, they is a leader who has bestowed a great vision on us, so that in time Dubai is going to become the first ever Arab modern metropolis." Was this about an Arabist dream of perfection? "No, this is not Arab nationalism. But what Dubai is trying to do is set an example of how Arabs should be represented. The Best Toes on the net, Rate my camel Toe