"An Offering to the Moon" by Clark Ashton Smith

Islas de los Ladrones is an old name for what is now the Mariana Islands

The Marquesas Islands are part of present day French Polynesia

Isn't it curious how the island is described as unexplored, yet there are natives on the island. Typical attitude of European explorers in very remote parts of the world...

centurial: relating to 100 years

oblation: a thing presented or offered to God or a god

irresoluble: having or admitting of no solution or explanation. The definition of this word should be pretty obvious, I include the entry here only to comment on how shockingly difficult this word is to pronounce. Seriously, try it. Let me know how many times you have to try before you get it right!

luctations: struggles or endeavors

revenant: one that returns after death or a long absence

salubriousness: health-giving; healthy

taciturn: reserved or uncommunicative in speech; saying little

voluble: talking fluently, readily, or incessantly

plenilune: full moon

inenarrable: incapable of being narrated; indescribable

selenic: of, relating to, or like the moon

whist: a classic English trick-taking card game which was widely played in the 18th and 19th centuries

pedro: an American trick-taking card game (of the All Fours family) based on Auction Pitch (the American version of the English trick-taking game of Blind All Fours which, in turn, is derived from classic All Fours (US: Seven Up))

exiguous: very small in size or amount

fulgor: dazzling brightness; splendor

Surprisingly (to me) there don't seem to be many ancient temples to the moon. There are a handful of very famous ones I wouldn't use because everybody recognizes them, but seemingly no obscure ones.

There were a couple of temples to the sun that didn't have roofs and aren't particularly famous, and I was tempted to use one of those, but few of them were usable from a copyright perspective, and a lot of them had people in the picture which ruins it.

So in the end, I had to find some picture that wasn't an ancient jungle temple dedicated to a moon goddess, and just went with a moon goddess type picture. One that wasn't of some angelic and good type of moon goddess, which almost all of them are, but one that could be seen as darker or at least ambiguous.

Unfortunately, I can't find a proper attribution for it.

To follow along: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/158/an-offering-to-the-moon