Had Metoro been reading one of the parallel texts in H, P or Q I guess he would have used the word tere there instead of here.

There are, though, alternative explanations. We could e.g. 'translate' this 'eel' into the 'male member', and then the story about Maui and Tuna comes to mind.

"Said Tuna, 'One of us enters into the body of the other, goes completely in. When it is over I will kill you, and take the woman back to my land...'

This is could be a story related to the picture in GD24. Tuna nui is a watery monster, with dark (watery) companions: Pupa vae noa, Poroporo tu a huanga, Toke a kura.

But if the 'snake' = 'eel' stands for the path of the sun, then why an evil eel? I guess that the idea of evil is just the 'colour' of Western mind, indoctrinated e.g. by the story about Eve and the serpent. In Chinese thought 'water' is 'female' and 'yang' and of equal value as the 'light', 'male' and 'yin'. Indeed the world is just a play of light and darkness on the waves of reality (no place for atoms there)

What is this snake/eel doing there at sunrise? Let's read another version of 'snake and girl'. It 'proves' that the serpent is a sunny character, active at dawn.