Mointains make you alive but also poor.
“High altitude and lots of rainfall together make for big population centers that are poor, because the mountains make transport very hard and expensive, which means there’s very little trade and very little wealth generation.That’s why Ethiopia has a population of 115M, bigger than Egypt’s 105M, but the country is very poor. You can’t tell that there are so many people from looking at nighttime satellite images, because they can’t afford light outside of the biggest cities.”
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/ethiopian-renaissance