Executives raised myriad questions with management. From the outset, “we did a fair amount of warnings to make sure that the leadership, especially at the board level, were aware of these risks”, said the senior executive.

Where would the 9mn people due to populate The Line come from? How quickly could they be reasonably expected to arrive? Could construction and manufacturing start quickly enough? Would the levels of imports required overheat the economy? What if oil prices sank, drying up Saudi Arabia’s key source of revenue? What if the necessary materials could not be found? And did the Gulf nation really have the scientific and technical expertise to execute such a vast scheme?

Yet the pressure to deliver was relentless. The board expected the chief executive to “move things very quickly”, said the senior executive. “Dates had been given to the crown prince about what was achievable, but without the detail of knowing how it could be done,” said the senior design manager. When those dates were made public, there would be a loss of face if they weren’t met. “That’s where tensions grew.”

Staff were “being put into a position of effectively having to lie about the timescales and the cost of delivering the vision”, they added.

What remains

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The Line — or at least its beginnings — can already be seen from space. Satellite imagery shows excavation and tunnelling work for the railway system, the “spine” connecting The Line to Neom International Airport, stretching for 150km — from the coast into the Hejaz mountains.

In a valley between two mountain ranges, levelling work is evident for the airport and its runways. “In true Neom fashion, there’s a mountain at the end of the runway that had to be blown up,” said the senior architect. Construction work has now stopped on both the spine and the airport. No new target for the airport has been set.

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The foundations for The Line’s first modules — perhaps the largest piles ever laid by man — are also visible, waiting to support the world’s largest occupied building, if it ever arrives. The village of Qayal, which was a few kilometres from the “hidden marina”, has been razed. Fifteen members of the Huwaitat tribe who protested against their eviction were sent to prison, some for up to 50 years, and three others were sentenced to death, according to human rights observers.

At the marina, excavations by late last year had dug out 100mn cubic metres of soil, the equivalent of 40 Great Pyramids of Giza. Ships will access it via a canal leading more than a kilometre inland from the coast.

The chandelier, the upside-down office building hanging from the giant arch above the marina, remains in the plans. But Neom no longer intends to base its headquarters there. Neom’s deputy chief executive Rayan Fayez acknowledged last month that the project’s budget “evolves every day”, adding that it was a good point to “reassess what worked and what hasn’t worked”.

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With the goal now to build just three of the 20 modules originally planned, the ambition for The Line’s first phase is a faint echo of what it once was. One person familiar with the project said work had effectively stopped, with efforts now focused on completing a few small buildings around the marina. Some of the earlier piling work has been covered with sand.

“I think as a thought experiment, great,” said one urban planning expert who works in Saudi Arabia. “But don’t build thought experiments.”