A little bit of Fermor in the night.  It works wonders for the soul, for the hungry, wandering internal monologue or dialogue that you might feel is lacking.  A little bit of Patrick Leigh Fermor, from his travelogue, Between the Woods and the Water (1986).  This book is about his on-foot trek across Europe in 1934 [specifically Hungary and Rumania].  (Three books actually chronicle the journey, this is the second one.)  The piece I've selected below is from the first major section when the young man Fermor is still in Hungary.

"On the fringe of allegory, dimly perceived through legendary mist and the dust of chronicles, these strangers have an outsize quality about them; something of giants and something of ogres, Goyaesque beings towering like a Panic amid the swarms that follow one after the other across this wilderness and vanish.  No historical detail can breathe much life into the Gepids, kinsmen of the Goths who had left the Baltic and settled the region in Roman times; and the Lombards only begin to seem real when they move into Italy.

The Gepids, an East Germanic tribe

Otherwise, all assailants came from the East, with the Huns as their dread vanguard.  Radiating from the Great Plain, sacking and enslaving half Europe, they made the whole Roman Empire tremble.  Paris was saved by a miracle and they were only halted and headed backwards near the Marne.  

The river Tisza

When Attila died in reckless bridebed after a heavy banquet somewhere close to the Tisza and perhaps not many miles from my present path, the Huns galloped round and round his burial tent in a stampeded of lamentation.  The state fell to bits, and ploughmen still dream of turning up his hoard of jewels and ingots and gold-plated bows."