Congratulations to the author! 

It is quite a feat to go by foot from the bottom to Shaharah, a village on top of a sharp high mountain ridge with no water, no good place to grow anything or raise animals, with just one benefit: the terraces below are good and hidden places to grow plants for drugs.

To reach the village, you first use an almost non existing path in a very desert-like environment,  then through a dangerous looking gap-like narrow valley that is blocked by an old forticfication from one side of the other. To continue, you have to enter the fortress, go hundreds of steps upstairs (so this was easy to defend in case of an attack) until you emerge  at the top. You think you have made it? By no means! Now you come to a narrow bridge accross a deep chasm where you can be shot at from high up (if you are considered an attacker) by men guarding the village!

For this reason, the village was never conquered, except that some buildings were partially destroyed at some stage by British bombardments.

There is no water up there, so during short rainfalls in winter huge cisterns have to be filled , providing the water for the rest of the year. Some smaller cisterns are used, when dry, for soccer, since one cannot play soccer in the village: the ball will invariably roll down the mountain side at some stage for 1000 meters!

The author Hasso Hohmann  has published one of the best books on Yemen, see https://austria-forum.org/web-books/jemen00de2019isds , and many interesting other travel reports e.g. on https://austria-forum.org/af/Wissenssammlungen/Essays/Geographie. With the brief description above you will enjoy going through the small booklet, even if you do not understand German, simply because what you see just shows basically  has been explained above.