On this sweltering morning, flouting journalistic convention, I have decided to assess modern Dubai not by looking up, but by looking down. Not by envisioning the future, but by examining the past.

I am standing within the coral and lime walls of Al Fahidi Fort, an 18th century anachronism amid the city’s ever-rising skyline of gleaming skyscrapers. The fort is home to the Dubai Museum. In its sun-bleached courtyard, relics of the city’s rapidly fading past are displayed: wooden dhows, an ancient well, a replica barasti house made from palm leaves. These artifacts testify to Dubai’s modest beginnings as a fishing port — before oil money transformed the city beyond recognition.

It is too hot to loiter out here, so I head to a shady corner of the courtyard, where an electric glass door slithers open and a welcome cool blast of air-conditioned air envelopes me. Inside, I descend a ramp to the state-of-the-art exhibition halls that have been built underneath the old fort. Here, life-size dioramas — complete with eerily realistic wax people — recapture the heyday of Dubai’s busy dhow port, and re-create the narrow alleys of the souk, where spices, earthenware and textiles from India and Africa were traded.

Perhaps the starkest exhibit is a sequence of photographs that illustrate the city’s breakneck transition from a scattering of flat-roofed houses in the 1960s to the current high-rise metropolis.

One of the last remaining bastions of tradition is Dubai Creek, which lies a short walk from Al Fahidi Fort. Here I catch an abra, or water taxi, which, for approximately 13 cents, will ferry me upstream to a terminal on the other bank — the part of downtown Dubai known as Deira. As the boat chugs for 10 minutes along the busy waterway, huffing blue smoke and acrid fumes, I am surprised to discover that dozens of dhows are moored along the wharf, loading and offloading everything from car tires to widescreen plasma TVs. Every few minutes, airliners roar overhead, bound for all corners of the world. But evidently they have not entirely usurped the old method of shifting people and freight to far-flung shores.

When the abra docks, I walk along the jetty to the concrete sidewalk, and face a dilemma. I could hail a taxi, and within a couple of minutes I would be in the very heart of new Dubai, amid giant cranes and fledgling skyscrapers, including the Burj al Dubai, which is currently rising at a rate of one floor a week in its ascent toward the title of tallest building in the world.

Or I could cross the road and immerse myself in further surviving fragments of the city’s past, the old markets. I cross the road. Soon I am plunged into the cacophonous bustle of the spice souk, and then the gold souk, and finally the perfume souk. It seems timeless, but the seismic shift that has taken place in Dubai within the past 40 years is as evident here as in the dramatically futuristic skyline. Very few of the traders, if any, are local Arabs. Most are natives of the Indian subcontinent.

Indeed, it is a curiosity of modern Dubai’s demography that locals are outnumbered by expatriates by four to one. The population has increased ten-fold in the last 30 years, and is projected to double again by 2010. Many of the new arrivals are Third World construction workers, providing the cheap ’round-the-clock labor for the plethora of new high-rises as well as several man-made archipelagos, including The Palm and The World, which soon will provide luxurious residential retreats for an international who’s who of the rich and famous.

One of the latest areas to undergo a dramatic metamorphosis is Dubai Marina, a 15-minute drive in moderate traffic (or 45 minutes at peak times) along the coast from Deira. Three years ago the area consisted of several resorts, including the lovely Ritz-Carlton, facing a broad, empty beach. Behind them there was little other than desert.

Not today. As I wade through t he bath-warm shallows of the Arabian Gulf, I look back at a skyline that now bears comparison with Waikiki. The four-story Ritz-Carlton is hemmed in by a forest of giant apartment blocks, most of which are nearing completion.

The great fear is that Dubai’s unprecedented real estate boom will prove to be nothing but a phenomenally expensive bubble. The city has staked everything on the principle that “if you build it, they will come.” An estimated 75,000 residential units are currently under construction, awaiting sun-seeking tenants from colder climes. If they don’t come, what then? It’s a question that nobody here seems prepared to countenance. Everywhere you look, veils of dust shroud ever-grander construction sites.

Driving inland, I skirt Dubailand, a $20 billion theme park which, when complete between 2012 and 2015, will be twice the size of Walt Disney World in Florida. Driving on through the desert for an hour, with wisps of sand constantly blowing across the road, I reach Bab Al Shams resort, an impressive complex built to resemble a traditional Arabic fort. Though this being Dubai, the echoes of traditional architecture have not precluded an amazing infinity swimming pool facing the desert dunes.

Stay away from the city for a day or two, and by the time you return it will have changed visibly. The skeletons of under-construction skyscrapers have inched a little higher; the lower floors have acquired coverings of tinted glass.

In my struggle to get a handle on this place, I have probably been looking in the wrong places. Ancient forts, dhow harbors, souks and Arabian-style resorts are all very well, but they are increasingly removed from the real Dubai.

Entering the city again, I pass the Mall of the Emirates, which better represents Dubai’s aspirations – aspirations that surmount even such trivial inconveniences as the climate. The outside temperature is 108 degrees. Inside the mall there are people skiing on real snow in sub-zero conditions. The massive, metal-clad ski slope — the first in the Middle East – juts out of the mall, rising to a height of nearly 250 feet. It looms above me.

I can’t help but look up.