KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait – On the road from the airport, when he passed the drive-in movie and pressed the accelerator to the floor, Muhammad Hassan felt the second carburetor kick in and he gave a little chuckle of delight.

This keeps him here, when all else fails – the eight cylinders humming, the tape deck playing low, they smooth, quiet surge of speed along the yellow-lit roads like fat neon tubes on the desert.

He had come for one year, and that was 1975, just to save a little money and return to Cairo, his home. Now, in the first days of 1978, he was forced to confess in a letter to his girlfriend that it may take another year to have enough money to return.

He does not like Kuwait, he said. You cannot drink in public and you cannot talk to girls. There are no nightclubs and no bars. People stay in their houses and covertly drink themselves sick. Now it is 9:30 p.m. and there is no one on the street.

But on this recent night, and for the moment, that did not seem to matter. He was 24 and on his own, with 20 dinars in his pocket and a shot of Scotch in his blood, Elton John in his ears and 400 cubic inches under the hood of his car.

This night, for the moment, Muhammad Hassan felt very much at home with the spirit of this place – flying through this ancient land where almost nothing is older than he, along this empty eight-lane road at 80 miles an hour and picking up speed, all eight cylinders of his wastrel Buick gulping fuel – and so what?

“How do you like this?” he said, as much to himself as to the visitor at his side. “How do you like Kuwait?”

For this tiny desert nation on the Persian Gulf, and for the thousands of Muhammad Hassans who have moved in from Egypt and Palestine, Iran and Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, the road ends 30 years hence, when the combined effects of need and greed will eliminate the geological quirk that underlies both Kuwait and its current joyride.

Until then, until the oil runs out, it is every accelerator to the floor.

The skyline of Kuwait City changes every day. The roads become wider, the houses bigger and more grotesque.

The building materials, appliances and air conditioners, furniture and carpeting, televisions and cars, graders, cranes, forklifts, computers, calculators, office machines, radios, stereos and telephones, along with every bit of food Kuwait consumes each day, keep arriving at the huge new port from everywhere else in the world.

Not much is made here, with the exception of money, but everything is consumed apace.

As the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, Kuwait has the money to spend. Exports in 1976 exceeded $10 billion, more than 90 percent in oil and oil products.

Since world oil prices have tripled in the last four years, Kuwaitis have spent feverishly. They have not yet found a way to keep up with their oil revenues, but they are trying.

The oil revenues flow to the government, and government spending is immense. The ports and the highways take just pocket money compared to the service items the government provides.

There are desalination plants for fresh water (free), pipes for delivery of water service (free), parking garages (almost free), televisions and radio stations (no commercials), hundreds of schools (free), a university (free), and a nationwide telephone service (free within Kuwait.)

Private spending is, if possible, more exuberant.

On the Korniche, or coastal drive, along Kuwait Bay and the Persian Gulf, past the rows of bland new apartments that foreigners rent for a fortune, a quarter-mile of low cement fence partially hides a compound of large cement buildings, connected by air conditioned walkways. There are a gym, an auditorium for movies, a swimming pool and tennis courts. It looks like an ambitious suburban high school. It turns out to be the villa of a sheik.

In the neighborhood of Dehiya, where only Kuwaitis live, each house attempts to outdo the last. This one looks like a 19th-century English Palace, all white stone and balconies. Next door, a Swiss chalet is built at five times scale, of dark wood, white stucco and stone. Next door, all cement and steel, stands a villa that looks like a new medical office building in a suburb with strict zoning laws.

Sometimes conformity reigns for half a mile as identical houses, all huge, line up behind a uniform fence. This is the compound of a Kuwaiti who decided to build a house for each man in the family.