... 'From now on', said Father Sun, grieving over Phaeton, his fallen child, 'you shall be Mink'. What meaning can this have for us? For such an understanding between men and men, and other living creatures too, we would need the kind of help King Arthur had at hand: 'Gwryr Interpreter of Tongues, it is meet that thou escort us on this quest. All tongues hast thou, and then canst speak all languages of men, with some of the birds and beasts.' This ability was also attributed to Merlin and Gwyon, those masters of cosmological wisdom whose names resound through the legends of the Middle Ages. In general, all fabulous communication was conceived as having such a range, not merely the Aesopian fable with is flat, all-too-wordly wisdom ... (Cfr at Te Kuhane a Hau Maka.)

Using our imagination we can guess what it meant for Phaeton - who had plunged down into the water of the Sea - to become Mink. He had to swim:

The picture shows the American mink, but presumably the myth refers to the Sea mink (Neovison macrodon) which was hunted down to extinction around 1860 (before he had been scientifically described). His fur was highly prized, but the animal himself obviously had no value. (Source: Wikipedia.)

At the other end of the Sea a new Land will emerge, and descending to it from the sky above the flexible limbs suitable for swimming will no longer be useful, they must be changed into inflexible limbs connected by joints:

... During his descent the ancestor still possessed the quality of a water spirit, and his body, though preserving its human appearance, owing to its being that of a regenerated man, was equipped with four flexible limbs like serpents after the pattern of the arms of the Great Nummo.

The ground was rapidly approaching. The ancestor was still standing, his arms in front of him and the hammer and anvil hanging across his limbs. The shock of his final impact on the earth when he came to the end of the rainbow, scattered in a cloud of dust the animals, vegetables and men disposed on the steps.

When calm was restored, the smith was still on the roof, standing erect facing towards the north, his tools still in the same position. But in the shock of landing the hammer and the anvil had broken his arms and legs at the level of elbows and knees, which he did not have before. He thus acquired the joints proper to the new human form, which was to spread over the earth and to devote itself to toil ... (Cfr at The Mouth of the Fish.)

When above I wrote 'in front of us lies the Sea', I was meaning that the solar zodiac from Capricornus to Pisces was in front of us, remaining to be explored.