For now, though, regardless of what happens with the economy or the building law, cranes will still rise in Shanghai: officials say as many as 2,000 buildings of all sizes have been approved or are already under construction.

A major building boom was under way on both sides of the Nevada border; cranes rose high against the sky, the noise of piledrivers was deafening, and scaffolding covered the sidewalks.

The first crane, installed by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Center, went into operation less than two weeks ago and rises 100 feet above the forest floor in Panama City's Metropolitan Nature Park to the top of the upper canopy.

The past was also quietly evident in the docks area around Lilla Bommen harbour, where giant and inactive cranes rise over the landscape.

At the rear, a strange outward-curving arm or crane of some black, lustrous material ending in a thick disk, rose high in the air.

A sooty yellow crane rose at the corner of 19th Street and the West Side Highway last Tuesday, supporting a drill the size of a tree trunk.

Where once stood Randall Cove's old safe house there was an open construction pit; a tall crane rose in the middle of this hole, and a group of construction workers were just now walking off the job after what looked to Web to be a hard day's work.

In the distance, about a half-mile away, a clockwork train sped along a tinplate track, the windows of its passenger-cars alight, and high behind it a clockwork crane rose up, tick-tocking as it turned.