Zobeir urged Amru to enforce the right of conquest, and divide the land among his followers.[375] But Amru refused; and the Caliph, as might have been expected, confirmed the judgment. ‘Leave the land of Egypt,’ was his wise reply, ‘in the people’s hands to nurse and fructify.’ As elsewhere, Omar would not allow the Arabs to become proprietors of a single acre. Even Amru was refused ground whereupon to build a mansion for himself. He had a dwelling-place, the Caliph reminded him, at Medîna, and that should suffice. So the land of Egypt, left in the hands of its ancestral occupants, became a rich granary for the Hejâz, even as in bygone times it had been the granary of Italy and the Byzantine empire. [Sidenote: Amru reopens communication between the Nile and Suez. A.H. XXI. A.D. 641–2.] A memorable work, set on foot by Amru after his return from Alexandria to Fostât, facilitated the transport of corn from Egypt to Arabia. It was nothing less than the reopening of the communication of old subsisting between the waters of the Nile in Upper Egypt and those of the Red Sea at Suez. The channel followed the most eastern branch of the river as far north as Belbeis, then turned to the right through the vale of Tumlât, and, striking the Salt Lakes near Timseh, so reached the Red Sea by what is now the lower portion of the Suez Canal. Long disused, the bed, where shallow and artificial, had in that sandy region become choked with silt. The obstructions, however, could not have been very formidable, for within a year they were cleared away by the labour of the Egyptians, and navigation thus restored. The Caliph, going down to Yenbó (the Port of Medîna), there saw with his own eyes vessels discharge the burdens with which they had been freighted by Egyptian hands under the shadow of the Pyramids of Ghîzeh. The Canal remained navigable till the reign of Omar II., that is, for eighty years, when, choked with sand, it was again abandoned.[376] [Sidenote: Amru would teach the natives to respect the Arabs.]